Team:ULaval/Contribution
CONTRIBUTION
Team iGEM ULaval 2020 made several contributions for iGEM teams.
Our projectaims to use an enzyme to degrade dextran in ropy maple syrup. As such, we have submitted a dextranase from Gelidibacter algens, a psychrophile (cold-adapted) organism, to the iGEM registry with code BBa_K3493000. We have done in silico validation and are in the process of carrying out experimental validation of this enzyme after optimizing its codon usage for Escherichia coli. This partis the starting enzyme we will be using for our experiments, and we are aiming to optimize it to be active at a higher viscosity during the 2021 season. Our team also submitted the sequence of the Aureobasidium subglaciale dextranase to the iGEM registry with code BBa_K3493001. This is another dextranase from a psychrophilic organism, but we decided to keep it as a backup plan because A. subglaciale is an eukaryotic organism. As such, it would likely be hard to express properly in E. coli.
During the process of gathering information for our project, we found that Team iGEM Shenzhen 2018 had previously submitted a dextranase to the iGEM registry. However, we found that it was misannotated when we performed a BLAST search and compared it to available sequences from the PDB and Uniprot. Their sequences for dextranase and exo-fructosidase were inversely annotated.
We reached out to iGEM HQ to ask about the procedure needed to submit a correction to the iGEM registry. They authorized us to do the correction, but were not able to put us in touch with members from iGEM Shenzhen 2018. We tried reaching out to their institution but we did not receive an answer before the wiki freeze. Ultimately, we decided to go ahead and apply the correction directly on the registry (parts BBa_K2551002 and BBa_K2551003) with a note on our procedure.
support on toehold design
Following the success of our previous year’s project at the 2019 Giant Jamboree, our team was invited to present our tool for toehold design at an online webinar as part of the iGEM 2020 Dry Lab Impulse series.The webinar took place on August 27th, 2020, with around 25 attendees. A couple of teams were interested in our tool, particularly team iGEM AUC-EGYPT 2020,which reached out to us to provide assistance using their tool. They ran into some issues when trying to use the code from our Github repository,but we were able to debug the tool together. In the end, the tool helped them produce toehold riboswitches for SARS-CoV-2.