Team:IIT Kanpur/InterLab

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InterLab

Complying with the trend of InterLab Study, iGEM conducts every year, to achieve the full potential of synthetic biology, invariably making every lab on earth build upon others’ work.
The question of iGEM 2018 InterLab Study was, ‘Can we reduce lab-to-lab variability in fluorescence measurements by normalizing to absolute cell count or colony-forming units (CFUs) instead of OD?’
Approach 1:
Converting absorbance of cells to absorbance of a known concentration of beads.

Approach 2:
Counting colony-forming units (CFUs) from the sample.

The Protocol

Here are the summarised results of our interlab:

Meeting with Dr. Purnendu Bose

As an academic venture, our team felt that discussing our ideas with fellow academicians would contribute to the growth of our project and also help us from pursue new lines of thought that we had not yet explored. To address this we felt that experts with knowledge on both environmental engineering and experience in practical implementations would be of great value.
We met with Dr. Purnendu Bose who is a Professor at the Dept. of Civil Engineering at IIT Kanpur and he specializes in environmental engineering. Our discussion was a fruitful exchange where we introduced our project about how we plan to clean detergent-laden water. We were unclear of any useful implementations.
He told us about the current problem faced by companies making Washing machines. People who are the target customers for these companies have the money to afford washing machines, but they still do not get personal washing machines due to lack of availability of clean water. He then suggested that we can model our product along the lines of this problem. It proved to be a crucial piece of information, and the whole conversation proceeded to ideate a washing machine add-on that recycles the water that it uses, and hence the water requirement for the washing machine decreases a lot. This model could be used generally to cut water wastage at a significant rate.

Meeting with Dr. Rajiv Sinha

We met Dr. Rajiv Sinha who is also a Professor at the Dept. of Civil Engg. His expertise lies in Bioremediation, and his advice and suggestions were very helpful to us. Our problem was that though we had some idea of how our bacteria would work in the controlled settings of our lab, we did not know what challenges we would face when applying the same to water samples from the real world. One particular problem we had was that our enzyme might not work in the pH conditions, the presence of other ions etc. and so to understand real-world challenges we shared this problem with him.
He suggested that we test our protein’s function on SDS in the presence of major ions in water and see the concentration's effect on protein function. He guided us to check protein functionality with each of the major ions separately, to better assess the effects of each ion individually. We could then see the level of these prominent ions in water bodies in different places and formulate our strategy for implementing our device in the future. Another important point he reiterated was, that instead of targeting the affected water bodies, it would be more efficient if we could tackle the problem right at the source itself. He explained to us how that model would not only bring down cost, but help avoid the unpredictability of the composition of water being cleansed.

AutoCAD Model - Our Design

To be soon uploaded...

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