Contribution
Contents
Overview
Throughout the 2023/24 iGEM season, UBC Vancouver has made immense efforts across all sub-teams to ensure that our project is able to offer meaningful contributions to the scientific community. These contributions are documented in detail throughout our team Wiki and highlighted below for our wet lab, dry lab, and human practices work.
Wet Lab Contributions
New Basic Part: Thermostable Terminal deoxynucleotidyl Transferase (ThTdT)
Our team thoroughly characterized the new protein coding basic part, BBa_K5228000, which encodes for a Thermostable variant of the template-independent DNA polymerase, Terminal deoxynucleotidyl Transferase (ThTdT). This enzyme was used for nucleotide addition within the nuCloud pipeline which can be found on our Experiments page. All protocols designed and adapted by our team have also been made available on our Protocol page to allow for future use by other teams.
Dry Lab Contributions
Open Source Software
Our semi-specific encoding and decoding pipeline is available at gitlab.igem.org for other iGEM teams to download and use. All required artifacts for building are included.
Hardware
Our team developed an affordable and modular bioreactor accelerate the growth of our ThTdT-expressing chassis, E. coli. User feedback was incorporated between each design iteration to implement additional reaction control features and sensors to optimize its performance. Future iGEM teams can refer to the CAD design files linked here to reproduce our design. We also designed and manufactured microfluidic chips to translate our SPS DNA synthesis reactions to a microfluidic scale, along with microfluidic pumps to automate the DNA synthesis experiments for future biomanufacturing applications. Detailed documentation regarding our team’s work is available in our Hardware page.
Human Practices
Educational Activity Guides
As a part of our educational initiatives, the UBC Vancouver iGEM team curated three easy-to-follow activity guides for hands-on STEM activities put together by our Human Practices team. These activities, (1) Design your own GMO, (2) A Synbio Case Study: Find the Culprit!, and (3) CRISPR-Cas9 Model Building, aim to teach primary-secondary school students topics on DNA, Genetic Engineering, and Synthetic Biology in an effort to enrich the British Columbia curriculum and inspire the next generation of scientists to engage in such topics. These activities were also adapted for an adult audience to further engage the community in a fun and digestible manner.
The guidelines for each activity have been made available on our team’s Education page as well as on the National Let’s Talk Science Volunteer Activity portal for use by STEM volunteers across Canada. We hope to continue this collaboration each year to further spread Synthetic Biology knowledge within our local and national communities.
