Contribution

The iGEM competition is extremely exciting for all participants, but it can also be quite stressful. Thus, input and contributions from past iGEM teams are invaluable to both current and future iGEM teams and teams of young researchers looking for open-access ressources. With this in mind, we contributed to future iGEM teams in a variety of fields that may interest them.

Coding with Biology Webinar

This collaborative effort of a number of iGEM teams was mainly focused on life science students, for whom coding may be an intimidating, but necessary subject. The hosting ouf the webinars (further details you can find on our UCL partnership page) online allowed an open access to the information in these webinars.

The Spider Silk Repository

Spider Silks are novel and promising material, however, with a high number of repeating sequences and many different types, they present a challenging protein to work with. Thus, with the help of other iGEM teams facing the same challenge, we created a repository for all things spider silk; containing protocols, troubleshooting, coding sequences, and more, we hope it helps future iGEM teams tackle this challenging, but exciting protein!

You can find the repository here

Human Practices: The Tools of Surveying

Human practices are an important part of iGEM, and one of the methods to explore them are survey and interviews. In the process of our partnership with TU-Eindhoven, we created survey and interviews for the purposes of human practices research. To make it easier on future iGEM teams to approach this subject, we created social media posts over 7 days, exploring and explaining our methods, goals and results (details here). In these posts, we especially dedicate three days to shows how we constructed our questions and what quantitative methods we used.

Our Parts

In our project, we worked with a number of rather difficult biopolymers. Thanks to plentiful advice, support, troubleshooting, and applications of the engineering cycle, we are proud to be able to contribute to the registry, and thus, to future iGEM teams, with a variety of new parts. In out part pages, you can find promoters, terminators, coding sequences, secretion factors and our spider silk composite part in form of an expression casette from our project.