Team:Toulouse France/Collaborations

iGEM Toulouse 2016

Collaborations and Meet Up

Meet Ups

Protocol videos

Our team decided to create protocol videos in order to help young scientists in manipulation. During our experiments, we filmed 4 steps of cloning: PCR, digestion, ligation and transformation. We asked other teams to translate protocols in their mother tongue. We obtained protocol videos in English with the Imperial College London team, in Spanish thanks to the TEC-Monterrey team, in Dutch with Leiden team, in Chinese with BIT-China team, in Portuguese thanks to EEL-USP team and in French with the collaboration of the Bordeaux team.
We wrote the entire script and we added some guidance in red (minutes for each paragraphs for instance). Teams had to translate and record the script. Now, we possess a lot of protocols explained in six different languages, accessible to everybody on Youtube and on our wiki.

Tutorials

When people are working on Genetics engineering, there are several basic experiments that have to be controlled. We wanted to create short videos to explain these baselines. Watching it, people could see how to manipulate safely. We gave details of the experiments in the videos, by adding written comments about the quantity and volume of the elements that have to be added. In order to give a greater accessibility to the global public, we have collaborated with several iGEM teams to translate the video in several languages. We would like to thank iGEM teams from : Bordeaux (French version), Imperial College of London (English version), BIT (Chinese version), TEC Monterrey (Spanish version), Leiden (Dutch version), EEL-USP (Portuguese version), and Hamburg (German version).

Please click on the flag to see the video

Digestion

This video presents the protocol to do enzymatic digestion of a DNA sample. This technique is useful for usual clonings.

Imperial College of London team

Tuto digestion

Ligation

When a DNA fragment is digested with digestion enzymes, it is possible to ligate its extremities with another digested fragment, if the extremities are cohesives. This method can be used to add an insert in a vector or a backbone.

tuto ligation

PCR

PCR, or Polymerase Chain Reaction, is a technique that amplify a DNA sequence by using primers and DNA polymerase. Throughout this video, you will see how to perform a PCR. A theoretical explanation of the way how PCR works ends the video.

c

Transformation

A transformation is a method that allows to insert a plasmid in a E. coli bacteria. Several method to transform a bacteria exist, but we chose to use a thermal shock method for bacteria to become permeable.

Growth study of B. subtilis and P. fluorescens

In exchange for recording the script in English, we studied the optimal growth of Bacillus subtilis and Pseudomonas fluorescens for the Imperial London College team. First, we did an experimental plan to observe if pH is in interaction with temperature. Finally, the conclusion was that pH and temperature were two independent parameters. We ran the experiments again, changing only one parameter.

Results

	Optimum Temperature (°C)	Optimum pH	Doubling time (minutes)
Bacillus subtilis (WT 168)	34-37	8	41
Pseudomonas fluorescens (SBW25)	<29	7,5	<80

Optimum temperatures and pH and the doubling times are summarized in the table for our two strains.

3D conception

We did a 3D Conception of the iGEM Bordeaux Team, on Blender.

We also did a 3D conception of their laboratory benching.

Receipt of plasmids

We want to thank the 2012 Munich team for sending us 4 different shuttle plasmids. One of these, pBs0k-p, was very useful because we used it for cloning in E.coli and Bacillus subtilis.

Mailing of kit

2016 Evry team asked us to send a Ludox solution that was in our iGEM Kit. They stored their own solution at -20°C so it was not usable anymore. But it was important for them to participate to the InterLab project so we helped them.

Protocol translation

2016 METU HS Ankara team wanted to create a database, which consists of different language protocols. They asked us to translate their protocol in French.

Surveys

We filled in different surveys all along the year. Among them, surveys for:

Bdx
IONIS
Evry
Valencia
TecCEM Collegiate
Purdue
UBGM

Meet Ups

The European Experience

The Evry and Ionis teams organized on the 1st and 2nd of July, a huge meeting that gathered more than 11 European teams. In different rooms, each team had a space to hang its poster and set up flyers and communication supports. We explained our project and discussed with other iGEM members. Some helped us on different aspects like modeling and confinement of our bacteria. When we were not on our stand, we walked around the rooms and learnt more about other brilliant projects. We met a lot of nice people from different teams and we sympathized a lot with every French team.

The organizers arranged two lectures during the weekend. First it dealt with the challenges and the risks of synthetic biology and the second talked about a new economic world. Different people, like CEOs of company, trainees, young workers, or research scientists animated these round tables. One of our best memories was to meet the founder of iGEM: Randy Rettberg. It was an honor for us to speak with this person and to explain our project.

We thank very much the organizing teams for these amazing days in Paris! It was for us an enjoyable experience of what the Giant Jamboree will be in October.

Meeting with Itzel from TEC Monterrey team

One day, on our Facebook page, we received a message from Itzel Guzman, iGEM TEC Monterrey team member. She was in Toulouse for a semester and she asked us to meet us, the iGEM Toulouse team. We discussed a long time on our project over a drink and we sympathized a lot! We decided to collaborate together on the protocol videos (view more).

Website by Team iGEM Toulouse 2016