Team:NOVA LxPortugal/Contribution

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Contribution

The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation is an organization that prides itself in the development of an open and cooperative scientific community. While it is the first time that Portugal is represented in iGEM, we were able to learn a lot with the help of the other teams and our iGEM mentor Lucas Boldrini. Our team also wants to contribute to both present and future iGEM teams. Our contributions are:

  • The introduction of Optflux1, a metabolic modulation engineering software developed in Portugal by Centre of Biological Engineering (Universidade do Minho) and supported by SilicoLife, to the iGEM competition. This open-access software will allow future iGEM teams to perform metabolic simulations and optimizations for different microorganisms in several environmental conditions.

  • We added four new simple parts (BBa_K3675000, BBa_K3675001, BBa_K3675002, BBa_K3675003) and two composite parts (BBa_K3675004 and BBa_K3675005) to the iGEM registry.

  • The creation of the first Portuguese team, promoting the dissemination of the iGEM competition and Synthetic Biology in Portugal. We also expect this is the beginning of a new tradition of having Portuguese teams participating in iGEM every year and that we can mentor these future teams, ultimately towards the creation of an innovation ecosystem in our country where Synthetic Biology is the key tool to solve real world problems.

  • The creation of a Pseudomonas putida model capable of producing spectinabilin. The model will be available in a SBML format to be used for future iGEM teams in their projects.

References

  1. Isabel Rocha , Paulo Maia , Pedro Evangelista , Paulo Vilaça , Simão Soares , José P Pinto , Jens Nielsen , Kiran R Patil , Eugénio C Ferreira and Miguel Rocha.OptFlux: an open-source software platform for in silico metabolic engineering. BMC Systems Biology 2010, 4:45