Difference between revisions of "Team:EPFL/Collaborations"

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Revision as of 17:13, 11 October 2018

iGEM EPFL 2018

Collaborations

Introduction

iGEM is about synthetic biology and about pushing the boundaries of the field to meet the needs of modern day problems with innovative solutions, however the spirit of iGEM has always been collaborative and we believed in adopting that spirit in the process of our project.

It was extremely important for us to collaborate with different laboratories that have expertise in the different aspects of the project. Our interactions with them were invaluable in the development of our project and we learned a lot from their input in order to adapt and improve the project to be shaped to meet the needs of the field and the relevant stakeholders. We have elaborated our story on our Integrated Human Practices page.

Equally important to our project was collaboration with other iGEM teams working on aspects of the projects that we could learn from as well as interactions where we could share our knowledge and experience gained through our project.

iGEM Austin LASA

We were very excited to collaborate with Austin_LASA and exchange ideas, given the similarities in our project. Both of our projects rely on Cas12a-fluorophore-based assays in order to create an assay that will allow early detection of HIV in infants (as Austin_LASA is performing) and early detection of cancer-relapse.

We have developed our Cas12a assay with the purpose of detecting point mutations and chromosomal rearrangements found in ctDNA as well as the detection of an amplicon that contains an amplified miRNA sequence to target. These processes are explained in detail on our Project Design page. (“LINK”)

(Inset Schematic of Cas12a Assay) During our project, we spent a long time working with these Cas12a assays and there was a lot of effort that went into the optimization of these assays that came with many trials, in terms of Cas12a pre-incubation time, activator concentration, DNAse alert concentration, etc. We had a very insightful discussion about our experiences and shared our knowledge and advice on working with such Cas12a assays. Here are the protocols that we shared with the Austin_LASA team, hoping that it would provide useful insights for their Cas12a experiment designs. (“TAB OF PROTOCOLS”)

In both of our projects, the ultimate goal was to design a “kit” and part of this kit would require an isothermal amplification step of a DNA target sequence. We learned that Austin_LASA’s team had successfully performed Loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) for their project and we took this opportunity to learn about this possibility of isothermal amplification, as well as the implications of performing it successfully. It was a pleasure to exchange ideas with them.