Team:BostonU/Collaborations
Northeastern iGEM Team Meetup (NEGEM)
In collaboration with the BostonU Hardware team, BostonU hosted the Northeastern iGEM Team Meetup, or NEGEM, on July 6th at Boston University. The five teams in attendance (BostonU, BostonU Hardware, MIT, Harvard, and UConn) all made Jamboree-style presentations, with 20 minutes to present and 10 minute question and answer sessions. In addition, all teams received feedback forms from every individual in attendance for teams to see how well their audience understood their project and how they could improve. NEGEM was insightful for old and new teams alike. For instance, we provided substantial feedback and guidance for UConn, a new iGEM team. Overall, NEGEM was successful in giving teams feedback at the third of the way point of the competition. After our meetup, we collected responses from the teams to gain insight on how the meetup could have been run more efficiently or been more effective for participating teams. Although improvements could be made (for instance, lunch arrived late which slightly set us back in our planned schedule), we believe that NEGEM ran smoothly. We hope that future BostonU teams continue to host NEGEM and will use the feedback we received.
Take a look at the feedback forms that the audience filled out for each team's presentation!
Nair Lab at Tufts University
We aimed to incorporate our two light inducible systems, LOV2 and PhiReX, into the xylose isomerase pathway to produce ethanol from cellulose. Our plan to accomplish this was to toggle between growth (high fitness, low ethanol production) and production phases (low fitness, high ethanol production) with the use of our light inducible systems to efficiently convert cellulose into biofuel. Venkatesh Gopinarayanan at the Nair Lab at Tufts University kindly gave us a high XYL-REG strain and DNA. His strain allows for high fitness on xylose, which would have been a prime strain to integrate our promoter systems into. Unfortunately, we did not have the time to use the XYL-REG strain with our systems, but we hope to do so in the future!
BostonU Hardware Team
We collaborated with the BostonU Hardware team after being inspired by the InterLab study, which required serial dilutions. We believed that these dilutions could be made easier using one of BostonU Hardware's microfluidic chips. BostonU Hardware made these chips and BostonU helped test them by manually performing the serial dilutions and comparing our dilutions to the chip's.