Difference between revisions of "Team:UiOslo Norway/Team"

We are all studying at the University of Oslo, which is the leading university in Norway and includes 8 different faculties. It was funded in 1811 and has more than 27 000 students and 6000 employees. The University lies in the capital of Norway, Oslo, and the buildings are spread all over the city. But the largest part is located in a "Blindern". We have our lab located at Blindern, Kristine Bonnevies house, Department of Biosciences.

Oslo is the capital of Norway, but also Norway's largest city. It has more than 650 000 inhabitants; this include many students that move to Oslo to get an education. Students in Norway are very fortunate; We study for free! Everyone can get a scholarship or a student loan.

Collaboration with K-Res in Tromsø
We were so fortunate to collaborate with scientists at the Center of National Expertise Service for the Detection of Antibiotic Resistance (K- res). We received clinical isolates of different ESBL-strains, accompanied with their ESBL-genes sequence information. These strains were used to test our detection method described in the “lab-section” of the wiki.

Nordic iGEM Conference
We joined the NiC which took part in the end of June 2016 in Stockholm. The conference was hosted by the winning team of last year NiC mini jamboree - iGEM Stockholm. Not only was this a great platform to exchange ideas between teams, but also a valuable social event where the Nordic teams also get to become friends. We attended workshop regarding ethics and speculative design where we at the latter got to think outside the box about synthetic biology. During the mini-jamboree we got valuable feedback from the judges, interesting question from the audience, and important experience by presenting our project. Good luck this year winner, iGEM Leiden, with hosting NiC next year!

Norway iGEM Conference
We initiated a mini-conference with the second Norwegian team, iGEM NTNU, 23-24th September. The conference was held at the Science Library at University of Oslo. We presented our projects in front of three judges that provided us with valuable feedback before the giant jamboree in Boston.

The Norwegian Biotechnology Advisory Board attended our conference and we are scheduled to appear on their GENialt magazine website. We hope this is a beginning of a new tradition that the Norwegian teams of next year will honor and bring to the next level.

Collaboration with team iGEM NTNU
After learning more about each other project we were interested in figuring out how we could help each other out. We discussed at the Norway iGEM Conference about how we further could collaborate and both teams were interested to see if the results could be generated in another lab.

We transformed TOP10 competent cells with plasmids (1-4) provided by the NTNU team. Preferably we should have transformed DH5α cells to meet NTNUs wishes, but we did not have these available in the lab at this point. We got instruction to plate the transformed cells on LB agar plates with ampicillin added. Unfortunately, not all transformations grew and we ended up with bacteria transformed with plasmid “1” and “4”.

Experimental setup:
The NTNU team gave us guidelines of how to conduct the experiment. Grow overnight cultures with LB medium, ampicillin and one bacteria colony at 37°C. Transfer the overnight culture to different incubation temperatures (30,37 and 41°C) and 200 rpm. This correlates to the experiment start point at 0 hours.

Check if there is any color change in the different temperature settings

Results:
We did not observe any visible color change in any of the different setups with either plasmid “1” or “4”.

Team iGEM NTNU also helped us out by performing an experiment with our protocol regarding use of Nitrocefin to test ampicillin-resistant E. coli and regular E. coli without any antibiotic resistance. During our experiments, these bacteria have been our positive and negative control, respectively. By following our protocol and filling in a provided excel-sheet they provided us with data that resulted to this graph. Although operating with different scales, the data provided by the NTNU team shows the same trends as our data indicate. The values in this provided dataset is significantly higher, and this could for example be due to the sensitivity of the instruments(spectrophotometer) used.

We want to thank team NTNU for the collaboration and a wonderful time at the first Norway iGEM Conference.