Team:CCA San Diego/Contribution

Our lab team learned many lessons from our many months of lab work and preparation that we wish to share for posterity. Through our many failures, frustrations, and successes, we have documented some of our experience and knowledge of biofabrication for future iGEM teams.

  1. Our Collagene Guide is designed for researchers and future iGEM teams who wish to use our blank template of bacterial collagen and insert other binding sequences for other engineering purposes.
  2. Our team wrote and compiled several literature reviews on topics related to biofabrication for future iGEM teams to access information from 21 studies in a compact, student-friendly way.
  3. More information about our Parts, the bare templates for Collagen expression, can be found at our Parts page.

Collagen Guide

CCA_San_Diego’s IGEM team designed a synthetic plasmid to express bacterial collagen, Scl2 protein, in s.cerevisiae. The Scl2 protein is highly efficient at replicating the structural properties of natural collagen, such as the triple helical shape, while avoiding the hydroxylation process. In CCA_San_Diego’s project, the repetitive collagen-like domain of scl2 was constructed with assembly PCR.


In order to make the plasmid design more accessible and versatile, CCA_San_Diego’s IGEM team created a guide for future scientists and IGEM teams to add additional sequences to improve the efficiency or create more desirable characteristics of the collagen for various applications. This guide includes some binding proteins found in human collagen that could be coexpressed for optimal collagen replication.

Our guide should be used in conjunction with our Parts documented on the Registry and Parts Page. Access our step-by-step guide and our Parts page here:

Literature Reviews

At the beginning of our season, the lab team turned to the literature to help guide us in forming our project. We wrote shortened summaries of key discoveries and takeaways from 21 papers, which we believe is crucial to high school teams who are looking for relevant papers and comprehensive information out of the vast multitude of literature on biofabrication.We took a “for students, by students” approach in order to understand the chemistry and procedures of our project that we are confident will cut down a lot of time for future iGEM teams working in the general field of expressing protein and manipulating its physical properties. Our literature collective covers four topics relevant to forming usable biomedical products out of expressed protein: Collagen, Sericin, Cross-linking, and Synthetic Biology.