Team:EPFL/Collaborations

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.

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.

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.

NUS Singapore-Sci iGEM Team

We were very happy to get the change to collaborate with the NUS Singapore-Sci iGEM Team ! Our collaboration was based on ethical reflections linked to the project, in particular to the methods used and the social implications.

The NUS Singapore-Sci iGEM Team had created a survey on the myths and misconceptions associated with Synthetic Biology. After sharing this survey with us, we entered a discussion that lead to the outcome of our team deciding to also create a survey that aims to capture an overview of the general public opinion concerning our project. As a result of studying the vast nature of the different subjects treated in our project, we decided to divide our approach into two: firstly a study on the impact of the techniques used in the project as well as the awareness of those performing them, secondly a study about the controversies that might occur in the future implementation of our project.


The survey was distributed in two stages, aimed at two distinct stakeholders of synthetic biology. The first stage was an official EPFL university questionnaire given to second year Life Sciences Engineering students during their laboratory practicals as a reflection part of an ethical course of engineers in biotechnology. The second stage was a distribution of a questionnaire beyond the scope of the campus and country on animal experimentation, patient biological data protection, vaccination and biotechnology in general.

The questionnaires, in terms of content, differs from that of the NUS Singapore-Sci iGEM Team and is focused on gathering data specific to our project so that we can understand how to implement that data, however the discussion and exchange of ideas that we had allowed us to clarify our intentions in terms of the subjects we wanted to touch on for our surveys.

iGEM GreatBay China

We had the privilege of collaborating with Great Bay China, a high School team from Shenzhen. We received numerous tips and good advice about poster design, the flow that iGEM presentations should have as well as information about common pitfalls and how to avoid them. On our side, we were able to help them with identifying backup plans to perform the last step of their transformation chemically, since the enzyme performing this action is unknown to this day.