This year, we organized a collaboration project names "Share your Healthy recipes." We uploaded the following prompt on iGEM collaboration page and e-mailed more than sixty iGEM teams:
Greetings, iGEM-ers!
Do you enjoy cooking? Have you ever noticed the similarity between cooking and experimenting—tea spoons to pipettes, seasoning to buffers, and recipes to protocols? For those who enjoy both cooking and experimenting, you should keep your eyes open to this collaboration project.
This year, our team is working to create a probiotics based solution to diabetes. In doing so, we are teaching the male elderlies who can cook how to cook diabetes-friendly, healthy recipes. We are going to create a handbook that contains healthy recipes to give out to these elderlies. Granted, we wanted to collect recipes from iGEM teams all around the world, ranging from Asian cuisines to American dishes to any tasty food that you want to share! Our team will create and upload cooking videos for some of the best recipes.
If you want to participate, please send a one paragraph recipe with ingredients and instructions as well as the photo of the final products. The menu can vary from anything such as soup to probiotics yogurt recipe!
As a response, many iGEM teams from all around the world shared their country's unique recipes that are both delicious and healthy. Namely, ICT-Mumbai and VIT Vellore from India, Nawi-GRAZ from Austria, TecCEM from Mexico, and Lambert GA from Atlanta generously donated their detailed recipes and photos. We gathered these recipes in a handbook titles "iGEM protocols... for diabetes friendly recipes" that showcase detailed methods and materials for some scrumptious meals. You can access to the recipe from the following pdf file:
We collaborated with Team US AFRL CarrollHS by participating in a project named Mike the Microbe. According to Team US AFRL CarrollHS, this project is one of the various forms of “Flat Stanley.” ”Flat Stanley” is Jeff Brown’s book, that one can connect with others by sending a paper "Flat Stanley" (microbe) across the world. “Mike the Microbe” is Team US AFRL’s own version of Flat Stanley. We requested a picture of Mike the Microbe to Team US AFRL CarrollHS and received two characters: Chia the Chitinase. Then, we sent a picture above to them for our collaboration.
In order to place their research in greater context, many iGEM teams organise surveys and request other iGEM teams from all around the globe to participate. This year, our team participated on a number of surveys to offer help to theses teams. The followings are examples of various surveys that our team had participated in this year:
Survey about food problem : Team Botchan Lab Tokyo organized a survey that questions about society’s recognization toward food. We could not get a specific reason why they made this poll since we could not be replied by them. However, participating in this survey, we sincerely answered questions about nutrients of food or GMO(Genetically Modified Organism) problems.
Invasive Species Survey: Team UNebraska-Lincoln is trying to create an effective bait for the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle, an invasive species to North America. We assisted Team UNebraska-LincolnOur gathering data by answering 10 questions in the survey, such as basic knowledge of invasive species or preference of GMO products.
Burn General Knowledge Survey: Team TecCEM organized a survey to gain information about different treatments of burns around the world, the prevention that is held in your country and how are the statistics in it. By answering their project, we could help their project since Team TecCEM is looking forward to developing a new treatment for burned people, that will reduce the time of hospitalization and help skin regeneration.
Team ICT-Mumbai survey - BBrickIt: Team ICT-Mumbai
developed a program that Bio-Bricks any dna sequence for you. The software checks for illegal sites and suggests changes in the sequence too. The team organised survey in order to gather the needs of iGEM teams in regards of their software, with questions regarding how each team created bioBrick parts and which softwares the team used in the course of iGEM project.
This year, we participated in Think of the PLOSibilites Blog postings coordinaed by Team Dalhousie . PLOS is a journal affiliated with iGEM foundation, that allows free access to all published materials. As an aspiring scientist who always had difficult times dealing with journals that costs over $100, we were definitely impressed by the goal of PLOS. Furthermore,This collaboration project was a great opportunity that allowed us to encounter numerous researches that we had never seen before.
To participate in this collaboration, we started to search a fitting research from Public Library of Science (PLOS). After much consideration, we selected a research about “Why Treatment Fails in Type 2 Diabetes,” which was written by Anders Rosengren, Xingjun Jing, Lena Eliasson, and Erik Renström. This article was containing several specific parts with Type 2 Diabetes: Failing Insulin Secretion in Type 2 Diabetes, Secondary Failure of Sulfonylurea Treatment, Using Slow-Release Sulfonylurea Pellets in a New In Vivo Model, Pros and Cons of the Present Study, and Clinical Implications. Summarizing this article had several difficulties. Although this experiment was tangentially related to our team’s topic, our Team had to learn this experiment with more depth to interpret. In addition, because we had to create our summarize without hard scientific jargons, swapping this complicated article with plain language was another barrier in this collaboration. Nevertheless, we successfully completed a posting in a title of “ Down but not out: insulin-producing cells can bounce back after drug treatment.” Through this collaboration, we are glad to assist in blog activity which can play a role of spreading valuable scientific articles in intelligible terms.
The following is the short blog post that we have submitted to the collaboration project! You can read the research article that we discussed hereand the original study here.
Title: Down but not out: insulin-producing cells can bounce back after drug treatment
Insulin is a hormone produced by cells in the pancreas called beta-cells. Insulin keeps blood sugar levels from getting too high (hyperglycemia) or too low (hypoglycemia). Diabetes is a chronic disease in which the body either doesn’t produce enough insulin (Type 1) or cannot use the insulin it does produce (Type 2). Managing blood sugar levels is important as high blood sugar can cause complications such as kidney disease, eye disease, heart attack, or nerve damage. Diabetes management includes monitoring physical activity, nutrition, weight, stress, and blood pressure. Type 1 diabetes is always treated with insulin, and Type 2 may require insulin and/or other medications. One such group of medications are called sulfonylureas. Sulfonylureas are used to treat Type 2 diabetes as they bypass the normal glucose-sensing mechanism to initiate insulin secretion. As a result, blood-glucose levels lower and the risk of secondary complications decreases. Unfortunately, prolonged treatment eventually exausts the insulin-producing beta-cells leading to a loss of blood sugar regulation. The mechanism by which chronic sulfonylurea treatment affects beta-cells is poorly understood.
In their article, Remedi and Nichols injected slow-release pellets with a type of sulfonylurea called glibenclamide into mice. They then monitored the mice’s blood sugar levels. They found that the mice progressively developed diabetes and were unable to secrete insulin. After the drug was washed out, insulin levels rebounded. This study may seem simple, but it tells us that sulfonylureas do not cause irreversible damage or beta-cell death, and exhausted beta-cells can recover to produce insulin again. This study also utilized normal mice rather than genetically-modified mice, which alleviated concerns about potential defects in pancreas development in mutant mice. Future work should address the precise mechanism of reversible suppression of insulin secretion by sulfonylurea treatment.
In the entire course of iGEM, gel electrophoresis was one of the experiment that we dreaded the most. Gel electrophoresis did not only confirmed that our pcr, miniprep, and cloning was successfuly, but also often confirmed the very opposite: our failures for everything. As a team leader, I was always harrowed by nightmares the day before conducting gel electrophoresis and roll in bed the night after enzyme cutting. In fact, we do have heaps of photos that showcase epic FAILURES of gel electrophoresis.
Yes, we've been there. And Many times.
From the same spirit, UNebraska-Lincoln coordinated a collaboration project named "Worst Gel Electrophoresis Scrapbook" and asked for iGEM teams to share the photos of some of their failed electrophoresis results. Being an expert at failing, we couldn't help but to participate. In fact, we had so many photos that we ended up sending two photos!
Figure 1. (a) Empty Vectors (b) PCR apocalypse
The first photo: Done gibson assembly, cloned, mini prepped, enzyme cut. Turned out that all of them were empty vectors (pSB1C3)
The second photo: Done pcr, gel prepped, ran gel after ruinous gibson assemble. Turned out that half of our DNA is a mess!
