Team:Paris Bettencourt/collaborations

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Team IGEM Paris 2011

Collaborations

During these past months, we tried to establish as many interactions as possible with different labs as well as other iGEM teams.

With iGEMers

Our main collaborations were in the Human practice realm, mainly with two teams:

'''Freiburg''' - we gave a thorough feedback to Freiburg's team after reviewing their "Oath for Life" project. The point we conveyed to them was about the respect of laws and regulations and the fact that they should mention and may be develop a point about international standards since an oath is valid ''if and only if'' everybody respects it worldwide.

'''Grenoble''' - We had a concrete exchange with the Grenoble team, with whom we were in constant contact throughout the past months. They lend us a hand on our Human Practice project by sharing with us their thoughts on the issues we were discussing on regular basis and shared the video of the debate about Synthetic Biology they ran to analyze. This was incorporated into own discussions, summary of which can be found in our human practice section, most notably where ethics is concerned. In parallel, we ran and analyzed the experiment they designed as part of their own Human Practice project. Their basic idea is to create two leaflets explaining respectively biology and modelling to people who are from the other discipline. We therefore sent them videos of pairs of students taking their tests (one from each background); these students pertain to the CRI's undergrad and master students (www.cri-paris.org). The choice of the target group emanates from the fact that these students srepresents a balanced mix of biologists and maths/physics and little did they know of synthetic biology. As for the test itself we followed the protocol that was discussed and decided upon with the mentor and members of the Grenoble team. For more information, see: Grenoble's human practice page.

Fig1: The quiz experiment. Study groups with the leaflet on the left and without on the right

Thanks to the Peking iGEM team, we re-used their 2007 iGEM project result (the push-on push-off system) in our own project. They kindly sent this device to us as well as microbial strains. We are indebted to their team leader for participating to a couple of our reunions at the beginning of our project during his stay in Paris; his ideas helped us moving forward in the different competing projects we had in mind.

With the world

During the project we established contact with several labs which gave us strains and plasmids. We would like to give special thanks to:

  • P.Dubey and S.Ben-Yehuda, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whose article spiked our interest and initiated our project. We thank them for the strains they gave us and for their kind advice in setting up the experiments
  • M. Elowitz, from Caltech, who gave us his pComG-cfp pComS-yfp contruction
  • L. A. Sonenshein, from Tufts University, who gave us ∆CodY B. Subtilis strains
  • J. V. Veening, from Groningen Usiversity, for the reporter strains he sent us in relation with the sporulation system
  • H. Putzer and C. Condon, from IBPC, for multi host vectors we biobricked and a kind help
  • S. Serror, from Orsay University, for the help and advice she gave us
  • D. Lane, from Toulouse II University, who gave us the tetR:YFP and TetO array we biobricked
  • P. Bassereau, from Institut Curie for the ideas she gave us to model the assisted diffusion
  • Y. Chai, from Losick Lab (Harvard University) who provided us strains for the biofilm project