Team:Sydney Australia/Contribution

Contribution

Although Sydney's COVID-19 lockdown prevented us from entering the wet lab and validating our design, we have been able to develop several contributions to offer to the iGEM community! These include novel parts, our novel recombineering strategy for multiple gene cluster insertions ('Babushka Blocks'), our modelling of natural transformation proteins and our theoretical design for a naturally transformable lab strain of E. coli, in addition to educational resources to advance accessibility to synthetic biology and inspire the next generation of synthetic biology researchers.

Outreach and Engagement

HSC Biology resource: On the topic of pedagogy, we have also developed a resource that maps out our project to the NSW Stage 5 and 6 NESA syllabus. This will be beneficial to iGEM teams in Australia looking to design a workshop/presentation to Years 9-12 students and are looking for guidance on how a synthetic biology project can relate to the content they are learning in class.

Project Design

fuGFP:We have added a free use GFP into the parts registry (BBa_K3814004). This has been used extensively previously in the Coleman lab, as described in Novel Parts. New Primer Discovery Method: We have developed a method to generate long primers (min. 50bp) that have very low self-dimerisation and hairpin formations, described in Primer Design. This will be useful for future teams that plan on using recombineering in their own experiments.