Team:IIT-Madras/Collaborations
Paris Bettencourt
We helped iGEM team Paris Bettencourt procure untreated unbleached cotton fabric (khadi cloth from some local suppliers) for their project.
HKUST
We discussed our projects with team Hong Kong HKUST over a Skype chat and helped them with the modelling aspect of their project. We performed a mathematical analysis of the tri-stable system model, and revealed an unfamiliar behavior of the tri-stable switch. The tri-stable switch undergoes oscillations in specific conditions. We first developed a Boolean model and proved the existence of oscillation performed by the tri-stable system. A more detailed model based on ordinary differential equations was formulated to further characterize the oscillatory behavior of the system. This further confines the conditions at which oscillation occurs as well as identifying the parameters controlling the magnitude of the oscillation. A report of our contribution to their project can be found here. We thank HKUST HongKong team for playing our game and giving us feedback.
iGEM Meetups
We participated in two Indian iGEM meetups. One of them was conducted by SVCE Chennai team. Nitish and Venkat went to attend the meetup, held at their college. This meetup was attended by IISc Banglore team as well. All three teams presented their project to the audience, which was followed by audience questions. This event gave us a very good opportunity to share our ideas and experience regarding lab work, human practices and collaborations. We had a lot of fun presenting our respective projects and interacting with the other teams who attended(IISC Bangalore and SVCE Chennai). After this meet up, we agreed to send some important biobrick parts to each other to help validate our projects.
We sent our [parts.igem.org/Part:BBa_K1956016 K1956016] part, which is to be used for efficient characterization with internal control to IISC Bangalore and SVCE Chennai for characterization. We are thankful to both the teams for characterizing our parts.
We also helped team SVCE by characterizing their part, which was a composite part made up of BBa_K115001- RNA thermometer and BBa_K592011- Cj Blue green protein(702bp). We digested their plasmid with EcorI-HF and PstI and we found 2kbp backbone and 100bp insert, which meant that their part was not cloned properly. We reporter this result to team SVCE and they confirmed our results later on.
We would also like to thank iGEM team Peshawar and team IIT Kharagpur for publicizing our game and giving us valuable feedback on how we could improve the game, and thus make it a better educational tool. You can view team Peshawar's abridged report here
