Revision as of 11:03, 1 October 2018

Simply

Collaborations

BBrickIt!

This year, at iGEM Team ICT Mumbai, we developed an easy-to-use tool to BioBrick the parts. We call it BBrickIt! Numerous teams tried out our software and we got superb responses from many of them. Kalyani from iGEM UCSD said commended our software saying, “Amazing Work!”

iGEM IISER Kolkata were extremely happy to “bypass the hectic job of having to think of prefix and suffix sites, scars, illegal sites etc. before planning to clone anything in the standard vectors!” They used our software with 5 genes that were part of their project, and it worked amazingly well & without any bug.

Kyle from iGEM Washington University, St. Louis said, “The tool is easy to use and well outlined.” This software wold have helped them catch that they initially forgot to add the BioBrick prefix and suffix to their gene sequence! iGEM ECUST said, “BBrickIt is a useful tool for iGEM teams in producing complete BioBricked part and is also very efficient.”

Many teams asked us to make a comprehensive user manual for this software and without any delay we created one and shared with all of them! Also, initially, we shared an .exe file on Github, which worked only on Windows operating system. Many teams use MacOS as their major operating system. Taking their suggestions into account, we immediately started working on Mac version of the software.

Modelling: iGEM Tec Monterrey

Before going to actual in vitro studies, we wanted to check how our design of oscillatory circuit works in silico. We had already prepared a stochastic model of the circuit, but we wanted to verify it from experts. We had a discussion with iGEM Tec Monterrey to discuss about the project earlier in this iGEM Season and they helped us out with our modelling. They verified our program and equations for us, and suggested the concepts such as leakage transcription which we missed to take into account. Their help was very valuable in terms of refinement of modelling of our initial circuit design. Even though we were not able to gather the experimental data and decided to go about designing a different circuit (See Design Tab) altogether, conversations with iGEM Tec Monterrey were highly informative and educative for our modelling experience.

Healthy Recipe: iGEM HAFS

Team HAFS is working towards finding optimal solution to diabetes. As a collaboration activity, they expected to collect healthy recipes from all around the world. ICT-Mumbai participated in this activity. We shared the recipe of Beetroot Raita, which is very commonly prepared in Maharashtrian households. The main ingredient, Beetroot, has been found to have many health benefits such as lowering blood sugar, detoxification to name a few. This very easy to make, and very tasty at the same time, recipe was an excellent contribution to the healthy recipe initiative of iGEM team HAFS.

Human Practices: iGEM WashU

Team WashU is working towards engineering yeast to produce a wheat rust resistance protein. As a collaboration activity, they expected to collect responses from variety of wheat farmers across the world. We helped them with relevant data from India. During one of our IHP visits, our team interacted with wheat farmers and collected responses to the specific questions sent by the WashU team. Team also provided the contacts of some farmers in India as part of the collaboration activity, thus helping them to improve their network of farmers and gain information about specifics of damage caused by wheat rust and their preventive measures.