Team:AshesiGhana/Partnership
Read below to discover our partnerships.
Partnership
First and foremost, we are humbled to have been given the opportunity to work with such amazing teams -- iGEMINI and UCL iGEM. We’re also glad that we learned from them and they learned from us as well. Further information can be found below.
iGEMINI
Design
iGEMINI gave us quite a few things to think about such as considering whether the environment in which our bacteria would grow is going to be favourable enough. Our bacteria have an optimum growth at a certain temperature, which is 37°C, but they advised us to find out if our bacterium has a range of temperatures in which it can grow.
They also brought to our realization the means through which our bacterium would feed if it's in the tetrapod. They shared some papers with us as well. From these papers, we learned the importance of codon optimization to increase the protein and enzyme expression in the gene. Thus, we decided to try and run codon optimization in Benchling for our plasmids. However, since we did not have a chance to go to the lab this year, next year’s team would receive these results and determine what to do with them.
This feedback was important as it helped shape the way forward for our design. In addition, it will help next year’s team when they decide to go to the lab.
Entrepreneurship
Rosemond and Tamisha had a call with Pierre concerning the entrepreneurship aspect of iGEMINI’s project. Through this meeting, we had a refresher of the basics of design and entrepreneurship we did in first year, and we learned some tips and tricks as to how to potentially implement our project outside of iGEM.
One major aspect of this call that was useful was the explanation Pierre made with respect to conducting a risk studies analysis. The risk studies analysis is a table that summarizes the potential risks a project could face, the probability of that risk occurring, the impact of the rish, and the severity of that risk. From this aspect of the meeting, we learned that it is important to sit back and look subjectively at our project as we try to determine the potential risks we face and also what we can do to mitigate such risks. While we did not conduct this at the beginning of the iGEM season, we would definitely consider doing this next year so that we also work out risk mitigation measures.
Another way this call helped us is that it made us think critically about the various aspects of our project and not just the synthetic biology aspect. We realized that we had been so focused on the biology and modelling part of our project that we forgot to fully consider the implementation aspect of the project. Thus, this meeting was a great refresher to allow us to refocus on the implementation aspect. It was a great meeting and we are grateful for the help provided.
Human Practices
iGEMINI provided us with a contact for a company in France called Carbios. For Carbios, it has given us a great starting point for next year’s team as they have an enzyme that is extremely efficient at degrading PET. By the time we are in the lab, would be able to say for sure how best we can incorporate Carbios into our project. Next year, it is likely that Carbios will be contacted so that we speak to them about their enzyme and whether or not it would be relevant for our project. However, this might be done by a different team.
They also gave us the contact for a bioluminescence company named Glowwee.Glowwee has given us a different perspective with respect to using and incorporating bioluminescence into our project.
For Glowwee, we will use their contact for human practices in understanding the industrial uses of bioluminescence. In addition, we will also see if there is any way that we can employ how they use bioluminescence for businesses in Ghana. e.g. seeing if there’s a way we could set up a mini company for bioluminescence in Ghana
UCL iGEM
During the iGEM season, we received an email from the UCL iGEM team inquiring about establishing a potential partnership for the rest of the iGEM season. We quickly realized that both teams were working on tackling plastic pollution and that this partnership would prove to be invaluable.
As our team is made up of 9 engineers and 1 biochemist, we knew that we would need some extra help with respect to the genetic design of our project as well as various ways to think about the implementation of our project. We were so fortunate to receive this help from the UCL iGEM team as they provided us with useful advice pertaining to how we could design our project. At various stages of our project, we provided them with what we were doing and they gave us feedback and specific suggestions, such as using two strains instead of trying to use three or more. They also made us aware of doing research into biocontainment and codon optimization for next year’s iGEM team.
We also worked together with our Human Practices teams and this was a great initiative as we realized that we needed to design synthetic biology communication and outreach materials to make sure that people in Ghana are more educated about synthetic biology affairs.
We had an amazing time working with them, and we are very grateful they reached out to us! More information about our partnership with them, in terms of Human Practices, can be found on our Human Practices page.