• Introduction
  • Home
  • The Team
  • Photo Gallery
• Our Project
  • Results Summary
  • Selection System
  • In-Vitro Characterization
  • In-Vivo Characterization
  • Microfluidics
  • Data
  • Attributions
• Tools
  • Gibson Assembly
  • MITOMI
• Notebook
  • Protocols
  • May
  • June
  • July
  • August
  • September
  • October
• Considerations
  • Human Practices
  • Safety
• Acknowledgements
  • Sponsors
  • Partners

Human practices

Instead of reaching out to the general population, we decided to use the Human Practices for introducing the iGEM community to microfluidics. Being from a technology institute, we took advantage of our university's expertise to use microfluidics chips in our project.

Microfluidics technology is a powerful tool for biological research, having a wide range of applications. Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• On-chip gene synthesis: protein expression from coding DNA
• On-chip chemostat chambers: can be used to trace the faith of a single bacterium or to grow bacteria/yeast
• Protein-protein interaction screening: for example between SH3 domains or to detect antibody binding
• DNA-protein interactions: to determine the binding affinity of a transcription factor or to discover new regulatory proteins

These experiments share the same advantages when ported on-chip: reagent volumes are reduced, therefore minimising cost, and the tiny size of each reaction chamber allows massive parallelisation of the experiment, leading to high-throughput screening. More specifically, in vitro gene synthesis becomes affordable at this scale, and the MITOMI chip we used contains 768 wells, all visible in one frame, which allowed us to quantify affinity of hundreds of protein-DNA combinations in a single picture. The small channels also allow fine control over reaction conditions. Most soluble reagents can be used, including DNA, proteins, molecule libraries, and so on - allowing much creativity in experimental design.

Few iGEM teams used this technology for their projects. We believe that promoting the use microfluidics can help iGEM and improve the Parts Registry, specifically by providing more thorough part characterisation. To this end, we wrote a guide to get started with microfluidics, focusing on how to build a setup build a setup and outlining chip fabrication. To tickle the community's interest, we also created a live online microfluidics game, where iGEMers can control a chip located in our lab from their web browser.