“TOOLBOX” FORMULATION

University of Cambridge, Department of Plant Sciences

• Prof. Jim Haseloff, for giving us our one week introductory course to iGEM and synthetic biology, and continuous general advice
• Dr. Susana Sauret-Gueto, for guidance in our experimental design and great advice on how to manage and arrange a lab for maximum efficiency. Also for regularly checking on our work and giving very useful feedback.
• Dr. Moritz Meyer, for his help and support in the lab, not just with practical advice but with his constant sense of humour and unlimited patience.
• Mr. Aleix Gorchs-Rovira, for always being able to answer our endless questions on PCR and cloning, as well as help with the golden gate design (another example of endless patience)
• Dr. Payam Mehrshahi, for his always kind words, interest in the project development and help with protocols and analysis of results.
• Dr. Doris Gangl, for advice on strain selection with regards to biological containment, and working with Chlamydomonas.
• Dr. Francisco Navarro, for giving us insight on the measurement of fluorescence in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

Other sources of help

• Prof. Saul Purton, University College London, for providing us a series of chloroplast transformation vectors as well as the TN72 Chlamydomonas reinhardtii strain, also for the help in wetlab with protocols and analysis of molecular cloning with Chlamydomonas.
• Mr. Marco Larrea Alvarez, University College London, group member of Paul Purton’s lab for advice on working with Chlamydomonas as well as inviting us to UCL to troubleshoot some difficulties with the system and give us feedback of what parts would be useful to the research community.
• Dr. Nicola Patron, Earlham Institute, for helping us with define our Cas9 strategy, and practical advice on the using CRISPR-Cas9 safely
• Dr. Sarah Richardson, Ignition Genomics, for discussing our project with us.
• Dr. Jim Ajioka, University of Cambridge Department of Pathology, for discussing our project with us.
• Prof. Tom Knight, Ginkgo Bioworks, for discussing our project with us.

Public and Scientist Perception

OpenPlant Forum

Hosted at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, the OpenPlant Forum presented talks from some of the most exciting innovations and research developing in plant synthetic biology at this moment. The three-day event also featured panel discussions on predominant issues in this field, including a discussion on “Commercial opportunities and bottlenecks in the future of plant synthetic biology”, featuring the inventor of BioBricks and ‘godfather’ of synthetic biology, Tom Knight...