Team:Rochester/Collaborations
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Silver Collaboration
Hosted Virtual Regional Meetup with Cornell and SUNY-Oneonta
Our team hosted a virtual meetup with the Cornell iGEM team and the SUNY-Oneonta iGEM team to present each team’s project ideas. Our advisor, Dr. Anne S. Meyer, provided feedback and advice on each team’s project, along with some tips about different components of the iGEM competition, such as policy and practice, wiki design, and building BioBricks.
Figure 1: Our Regional Meetup.
Participated in Proceedings Journal Project from MSP-Maastricht iGEM Team
The iGEM MSP-Maastricht team carried out a project that involved collecting and publishing team-written research papers from other iGEM teams about their projects. These papers will be published in an accessible database for the iGEM community. We participated in this initiative by writing and submitting our journal article. The title of our paper was: “Bio-Spire, continuous monitoring of sepsis biomarkers in sweat.” We peer reviewed journals by, and received feedback from, team iGEM Eindhoven 2021 and team iGEM GO-Paris-Saclay 2021. The final journal article is shown below.
File 1: Our Journal Article.
Participated in the Düsseldorf Team Postcard Project.
The Düsseldorf iGEM team led a postcard project initiative, in which teams designed a postcard that described their project. After we sent in our postcard, it was shared with other teams from around the world. Our postcard design is shown below.
Figure 2a: Postcard Front.
Figure 2b: Postcard Back.
Figure 3: Postcard from all iGEM teams who participated in this project.
Filled Out Survey for iGEM GO Paris-Saclay on Endometriosis
We filled out a survey on people’s knowledge of endometriosis around the world, initiated by iGEM GO Paris-Saclay. The survey was used for their statistical analysis of the project.
Sent a List of U.S. Professionals Working on Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) to iGEM IISER-Berhampur
We organized a list of professionals who are working on MDR-TB in the United States for the IGEM IISER-Berhampur team, who is working on a novel MDR-TB treatment using the CRISPR/Cas system.
Helped SUNY Oneonta on their Survey on iGEM Hardware Database
Team SUNY-Oneonta carried out an initiative to create a hardware repository for non-biological parts, since it is challenging to locate hardware parts and devices that are created by past and current iGEM teams for hardware design and assembly. Their repository would work similarly to the Parts Repository that is already in existence. We sent them our Onshape and COMSOL designs for the microfluidic device on our sleeve.
Team iGEM ULaval, Team Concordia-Montréal, and Team iGEM Patras--“Rosalind Chronicles” Participation
iGEM Patras announced a collaborative idea with Team ULaval and Concordia-Montréal called the "Rosalind Chronicles," a photo collage to honor women in science and inspiring women in STEM from across the world. To participate, we sent photos of our female teammates and a photo of our team’s favorite female scientist, Marie Curie. We also submitted a short description about our advisor Dr. Anne S. Meyer, who inspires our team to conduct work in synthetic biology.
Figure 3: The Rosalind Chronicles page. The middle is a short description about our advisor Dr. Anne S. Meyer, who inspires our team to conduct work in synthetic biology.
Collaborated with OhioState iGEM 2021 team on a Children’s Book about Sepsis and Sepsis Awareness Symposium
The OhioState iGEM team focused on sepsis treatment using phage therapy. After an initial meeting with their team, we proposed our outreach idea to be writing a children’s book to raise awareness of sepsis, and they proposed to collaborate with us on the book.
We worked with the OhioState team from July to October on the book’s illustration, text, and publication of the children’s book, which we titled “A Trip to the Hospital: Randall’s Lesson on Sepsis.” OhioState did most of the illustrations of the book, and both of our team worked on the plot of the book. This book was sent to professionals who work on sepsis, as well as friends and families from Rochester and Ohio to proofread. We got constructive feedback from Dr. Barbash, Mrs. De Las Casas, a licensed mental health counselor, and Angie Chung-Kirby, the Assistant Principal at Elida Elementary School in Ohio. Since we wanted to target children around 8 years old, we made a lot of effort to simplify scientific terms. We further adjusted the target age group to 8 to 12 years old according to the feedback we got from people mentioned previously. After the revision, we published our book on Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks for free. The book also has a paperback design that can be printed out. Below is the children’s book. When developing the children’s book, we focused on the following criteria:
File 2: Our book.
Figure 5: Our Sepsis Symposium.
Next, our team organized a virtual Sepsis Awareness Symposium with the goal of providing background about sepsis and point of care treatment while also including talks from sepsis survivors and advocates for sepsis awareness. Since our project focused on the diagnostic side of sepsis, and the OSU team worked on treatment for sepsis, we invited their team to present their project at our Symposium. For more information about the Symposium, visit here.
.Gold Collaboration
Gold Partnership with Osiris Rio UFRJ iGEM Team
Figure 7: Meeting with the Osiris Rio UFRJ iGEM Team
The Osiris RIO UFRJ iGEM team worked on detecting dengue disease with an electrochemical biosensor. Our team met with the Osiris RIO UFRJ iGEM team to discuss our projects on July 30th. Osiris RIO UFRJ team has worked with immobilizing proteins on the electrode. Since we were close to attaching aptamers to the screen-printed electrode, they advised us to carefully cast aptamers on the working electrode and not drop on the reference and counter electrode. They also advised us to use a potentiostat to measure cyclic voltammetry before and after the electrode has been modified with rGO and aptamers. Our team received very beneficial advice from the Osiris Rio UFRJ Team on how to use cyclic voltammetry, including what voltage difference and voltage scan rate to use. Because the Osiris Rio UFRJ had experience using a 3-electrode system measuring potential, they also provided us with insights on making 3D printed electrodes and using cyclic voltammetry to characterize the modified electrodes to ensure that modifications worked. They sent us the protocol for cyclic voltammetry that they conducted.1
Since both of our teams worked on a drop casting solution on the working electrode, our team offered help with using the drop-casting method to modify screen-printed electrodes, where we used a needle to drop small volumes of reduced graphene oxide on the top of our working electrode, and then, we used nitrogen flow to dry the solution. We offered to send this protocol to them as they also worked on modifying the surface of the electrode with the immobilized protein. The Osiris RIO UFRJ iGEM team also developed a different technique to overcome the issue of modifying the electrode. Additionally, we offered our expertise with Onshape software, which is important for designing 3D parts. They asked for help on the 3D design of the mask which could help them to properly paint screen-printed electrodes with carbon ink. Our team designed the mask in Onshape according to the dimension they sent us, which would help their team speed up the process of modifying their 3D electrodes.
Figure 6: The eletrode mask we desinged for the Osiris RIO UFRJ iGEM team using Onshape. After designing our software, we wanted to know whether it could be easily used by other iGEM teams and in different diagnostic projects. To test the ease of use of the software, we asked the Osiris RIO UFRJ iGEM team to use their voltage values for dengue biomarker with our software and gained some very valuable input to make the software more user friendly. They provided us with their data, which consists of the voltage and current change of a Dengue biomarker, Denv2 multi-epitope protein, with gold nanoparticle thiol modification in different concentrations. By plugging in their data, they showed that our software can successfully convert potential and current to resistance, and that they are able to obtain the sample plot of plasma biomarker concentration over time using our biomarker equation. Their feedback helped us improve the way we commented on our code thereby improving ease of use.
References
- Elgrishi, N., Rountree, K. J., McCarthy, B. D., Rountree, E. S., Eisenhart, T. T., & Dempsey, J. L. (2018). A Practical Beginner’s Guide to Cyclic Voltammetry. Journal of Chemical Education, 95(2), 197–206. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b00361