Modelling extraordinaire
As entering a wet lab was quite difficult this year, the modelling of our ideas was very important. But as none of our team members has modelling experience, we had some difficulties modelling our project. Fortunately, we had the opportunity to start a partnership with the iGEM team from Imperial College London - at a perfect time point when we were all desperate about designing our model. We met several times via online conferencing platforms with the team and realized that their idea of developing a modelling starter pack suits perfectly with our problem. This is how we got great help in writing the code to describe our project in mathematical terms. Moreover, they wrote a manual describing most of the equations needed in the model and helped us to understand the whole process. They also helped to alter the code for the different project scenarios .
The Imperial college London team has great expertise in using the SBOL designer as their iGEM project is about the development of a web-tool that uses that exact same software (http://soaplab.io/learn). We went through the SBOL design of our construct with the team using their interface so we got very helpful tips and tricks on how to use this efficiently and we could give the web designers feedback on their website, user friendliness and problems we were facing. This led the team to improve this tool further so it can be used by every scientist easily and without any borders. On the other hand we got a compact SBOL file which we could use for our Wiki. After that meeting everyone was very happy about the ongoing collaboration and we realized how helpful it is to work tightly together with other teams and share knowledge and skills.
Teaching the robot new tricks
Lastly we were able to test another tool from the Imperial iGEM team: They wrote scripts for Opentrons (OT) lab robotic systems to do automated assemblies. This was helpful for both teams, as the Imperial College London team wasn’t able to enter their wet lab for a long time and was happy that we could do some wet lab stuff for them and on the other hand we had the great chance to test one of these scripts with our own OT-2 and do a fully automated bio brick assembly. This was the first time our team got to operate an automated system. We are thankful for the opportunity to have been eased into the operation of that new equipment of ours by the experts from Imperial College. This way they were also able to catch some of the limitations and details that still need improving like sources of contaminations and so on. With all the meetings we had it felt like we became one big team between Hamburg and London and we all hope that one day travelling is possible again and we can meet in person and explore our cities together!
