Team:Bielefeld-CeBiTec/Contribution

Our Contribution: The Phototrophs-Handbook

Our contribution to the iGEM community is the Phototrophs-Handbook that is the effort of the Phototrophs-Community that emerged from our Partnership with Marburg.

Many teams that are thinking about working with phototrophic organisms choose in the end to work on different projects with organisms which are faster and easier to manipulate. Often a possible lack of expertise also significantly influences this decision. Therefore, we created the phototrophs handbook, which will help to overcome those obstacles.

The Phototrophs-Handbook will change the way future teams approach projects using phototrophic organisms. Our handbook is a huge collection of knowledge and protocols regarding phototrophic organisms. It is not only supposed to give undecided teams the confidence and expertise to start a project with phototrophic organisms, but also to support teams already working with those organisms looking for a collection of tips in every aspect that comes to mind when working on phototrophs.

Our handbook was created by the iGEM-teams of the Phototrophs-Community as a collective effort to fuse our knowledge and leave a legacy within and outside of iGEM. We started to create the handbook and gave every team the choice to contribute to the chapters they were experts in.

Our team contributed the chapter about the cloning strategy “Mobius Assembly” that helped us a lot for cloning our own construct. We also contributed the chapter about “Indirect Transformation Methods” for higher plants. We also wrote the chapter “Growth and Cultivation” of higher plants and all in all contributed our gained experience and knowledge to the handbook.

With new teams joining our Phototrophs-Community, the handbook will grow each year in its size with information about new organisms and protocols added and outdated texts being updated. Our goal is that not only new iGEMers, but also scientists from all over the world will benefit from the collected knowledge in the handbook. The Handbook will evolve from being a pdf-file to becoming a whole online-lexicon in the form of a website.