This year we have been working alongside iGEM teams from across the globe. We have been working closely with teams from Newcastle, Glasgow and Purdue to help each other improve our projects from both in and outside the lab.
Part of the Newcastle iGEM team’s project this year involved an experiment centred around the creation of biological electronic components. Newcastle asked our team if we could help them out by finding the thermal conductivity of different growth media. With the help of our biophysicist supervisor Ryan Edgington, we came up with a plan to measure the conductivity.
Using the apparatus we had available, we discovered that the thermal conductivity of LB and M9 broth to be roughly the same as water. The conductivity of water at room temperature is about 598.4 $\frac{mW}{Km}\text{ }$(mili watt per metre kelvin).We found the conductivity of LB and M9 to be (605 $\pm$ 20) $\frac{mW}{Km}\text{ }$ and (570 $\pm$ 30) $\frac{mW}{Km}\text{ }$ respectively You can read more about our method here.
Our team helped Purdue with this by logging data for the 260 iGEM teams of 2015 and critiquing ease of use and effectiveness of the database. For each team we documented a summary of what their project was about, their track, number of team members, chassis, research benchmarks, finished parts, the presence or absence of kill switches, medals and any awards and nominations. We tagged the teams summaries with keywords to make finding a project much easier.
We gave Purdue feedback on the design, layout and how easy this database was to use to help them improve on what they had done so far.
We collaborated with Glasgow iGEM 2016 to test the efficiency of the T7 Promoter we were using to construct the KillerRed, KillerOrange and Lysozyme kill switches. We new that it was leaky and we speculated that it was reducing the efficiency of our project but we needed proof that the leakiness of the promoter could affect our project. In return they gave us a DH5α.Z1 strain in the hopes it would improve the efficiency of our promoter. After subsequent testing we were unable to express our KillerRed and KillerOrange proteins in this strain. This is the report they sent us for the test of the T7 promoter: