Difference between revisions of "Team:MIT/Collaborations"

We met team Harvard at New England iGEM, a regional meeting held at Boston University. After hearing about each other’s projects, we became aware that both our teams envisioned cell encapsulation to be a component of our respective projects. During that time, team Harvard expressed concerns over finding an expert on hydrogels and encapsulation who could teach them relevant lab protocols and allow them to make informed decisions about their project’s direction. Therefore, both teams decided to continue correspondence in order to find an expert and get essential training.

In August, team MIT met up with Derfogail Delcassian, a graduate student working on hydrogels at the Langer Lab and she offered to help us get trained as well as provide imperative feedback that we could use to design future experiments. We got team Harvard in contact with Derfogail and they arranged a lab visitation day at MIT. Based on their feedback, the training and input that they received from Derfogail was very helpful. We continued our correspondence after that and planned to develop a cell-encapsulation protocol manual in the future for bacterial and mammalian cells, so that the technique would be more easily accessible for future iGEM teams.

We met Team UConn at NEGEM as well. During their presentation, they expressed concerns about certain protocols they needed help with and some lab training that they wanted to receive (and for which they could not find relevant experts at UConn). We reached out to them after the conference in order to provide them training in the relevant areas that they needed help in. They wanted to learn more about the electroporation protocol, making stocks of electrocompetent cells, Golden Gate assembly and lab work-flows. Therefore, in August, team MIT hosted team UConn at our lab. After a brief lab tour, we answered a bunch of their questions about transformations and golden gate, and mentored them through our own protocols.

Team MIT and Team WPI realized that we were both working on biofilms through Instagram and decided to collaborate on this common area. Over our Skype call, we both discussed our biofilm assay protocols and came to the realization that we had very different techniques to quantify biofilm formation. While we were using Colony Forming Units (CFUs) to quantify biofilm, they were using crystal violet staining. We therefore decided to share our protocols and agreed to give guidance to each other while carrying out these protocols. We think our collaboration with WPI was particularly impactful for our project as we used both biofilm assays to characterize the formation of S. mutans biofilm and then compared them to see which one was more efficient across different metrics.

We concluded that CFUs seemed more accurate and more quantifiable, where the staining method was a lot more easier and cheaper to carry out. We realized that to determine if there was a reduction in biofilm growth or not, a staining procedure was probably sufficient enough. We made a biofilm assay protocol manual, with both methods explained. We hope that future iGEM teams can use this manual and determine which technique works better for their project.