Team:Open Science Global/Wetware/Future-Directions
Horizons: The Path Forward
For us, as with almost every iGEM team, the Wiki freeze comes right when our team feels like it is hitting its stride and making real progress. We are gearing up to assemble Bacillus vectors with the homology arms we designed, instead of the origin of replication that failed synthesis multiple times. We are testing out BsaI and PmeI restriction digestion conditions on the secTag library plasmids, to find ones that completely digest them. We are exploring improvements to the library plasmid architecture, including replacing the low-fidelity ProClo overhang and determining if the random spacer sequences can serve as annealing sites for specific primer pairs, enabling not just combinatorial assembly but random access to each individual RBS/secTag pair (we would call these RALPs, or Random Access Library Plasmids). Having just receive a donation that equipped all four of our collaborating wet labs with fully stocked OpenTrons OT-2s, we are about to start programming them. Our frugal bioreactor designs are ready to test growing E. coli, B. subtilis, and Pichia. We are beginning to build enzyme manufacturing constructs for Pichia with the OYC. And we have designed a modification of the ProClo assembly standard with all its functional parts, but 98% predicted assembly fidelity when combined with the BaClo overhangs:
There are many important next steps toward democratizing the means of biotechnological production, based on what we’ve learned. And happily, because we got every piece of our wetware either MTA-free or under an OpenMTA from FreeGenes, we are ready, willing and able to take those next steps. And you can join us! One of the most important parts of our project this year was organizing in such a way that anyone in the world could join and contribute if they wanted to learn and believed in the goal of making it cheaper, faster and easier to do and make useful things with biological technology. We hope that the 2021 iGEM Jamboree, far from being a culmination or an end, is a launchpad, a jumping-off point for organizing to build the biotechnology commons and a better more just, sustainable world. So please, reach out to us @friendzymes, or at friendzymes@gmail.com. We’re always ready to welcome more friends on board