Team UANL
Overview
Our first iGEM season enabled us to advance on our scientific and social skills and many other areas. One of these advances was the promotion of scientific networks to exchange ideas and support in synthetic biology. This season we have partnered with the FCB-UANL, a Mexican team with experience in the competition and, like us, motivated to engineer Bacillus subtilis
We kept in touch with the FCB-UANL team during all this season, holding online meetings every month to discuss important aspects of our projects. This partnership allowed us to go beyond the discussions about Bacillus subtilis as we discovered common goals. Firstly, they gave us a class about Genetic Circuits Design in our SynBio Club, which introduced new design tools, especially for B. subtilis. Second, we worked together on the biocontainment design, which helped both teams save time in project development and helped us to learn more about our chassis from them. Finally, our team collaborated with the survey of Intellectual Property in different countries organized by FCB-UANL, which contributed to both projects in gathering regulatory and implementation perspectives regarding biocontainment aspects.
Mentorship & Education
As they are a team already experienced in participating in iGEM, the FCB-UANL team mentored us on several issues regarding the competition.
They helped us with some doubts related to protocols of B. subtilis transformation and cultivation. Furthermore, the FCB-UANL team members Raul Acosta, Alonso Flores and Daniela Alvarez taught a class about Genetic Circuits Design at the SynFronteras.Club - UNILA. The SynFroteras.Club has members from many countries of Latin America, and this was not a problem as the presentation took place in Portuguese and Spanish.
In addition, since the beginning of our meetings, we have supported UANL members with some tips on the cultivation and management of genetic editing in B. subtilis. These conversations made it possible to explore shared goals between the teams, including biocontainment strategies.
Biocontainment
As we said earlier, it's the first time our team is participating in iGEM, and we are already challenging ourselves to work with Bacillus subtilis! Despite being a well-domesticated chassis, B. subtilis has difficulties performing design, modeling, and metabolic control.
The UANL team aimed to program cell death in the case of B. subtilis switching to its sporulated form. On the other hand, our chassis needs to be in the sporulated form before entering the sandfly. Also, both teams plan different application conditions, UANL engineers its chassis to work in a bioreactor, and our chassis is designed to resist variable conditions in nature. This difference modifies the trigger for the killswitch. However, both teams shared the same goal of finding an efficient cell lysis mechanism for Bacillus subtilis, and that was the primary purpose of our partnership.
The lack of information about programmable death for gram-positive bacteria and the already well-documented toolkits for genome editing (e.g. CRISPR), endogenous lysis genes (e.g. Toxin-Antitoxin), spores containment, and killswitch devices for B. subtilis became a motivation for both teams to compile a table with Potential Cell Lysis Mechanisms for B. subtilis. This table gathers potential mechanisms for acting on biocontainment strategies, serving as a basis for other iGEM teams that seek to work with this chassis.
Finally, based on the research finding, both teams selected the CRISPR technology to work, which allowed us to continue supporting each other on the Kill Switch device design. CRISPR is a state-of-the-art tool characterized mainly by its precision, speed and capacity to modify cells in vivo; its functions include gene knock-out, editing, and others. This is the main objective in incorporating CRISPR in these projects, the ability to cut in specific regions (thus facilitating the degradation of certain recombinant regions) and in regions corresponding to survival genes, thus causing cell death. We shared information, protocols, and design tools, and we were able to give and receive support in the steps of the genetic circuit development.
Intellectual property
The FCB-UANL team invited us to write a descriptive analysis on how to get Intellectual Property in Brazil. We accepted the challenge and wrote a concise review on the key points about patent deposit for biotechnologies in our country, such as the regulation of patents for modified microorganisms and plants/cultivars and the definition of transgenic organisms according to legislation and influence of the Law of Access to Genetic Resources. In addition, we calculated the time and resources needed to obtain patents, the results of the comparisons between countries can be entirely accessed on FCB-UANL wiki page.