It was important for us that the work we conducted during the 2022 iGEM cycle was useful for future iGEM teams and beyond. Thus we have worked through an easy-access scope, aiming for standardization and open-source whenever possible.
A modular synthetic expression system
The work conducted in this project includes the development of a system which is one of very few reported synthetic expression system (SES) for filamentous fungi. The system is designed to be inducible, but unfortunately, due to time restraints, inducibility is yet to be proven. Furthermore, this is the first fungal SES in iGEM history, and the work described in our wiki allows for easy use of this fungal SES for future iGEM teams. The modular nature of the system allows for easy exchange of domains. This enables for other possible compounds of interest to be detected and new DNA binding sites to be targeted by the system with minimal engineering, if needed.
A transient expression platform for A. niger
Through our work we have made efforts into making it easier to work with A. niger. This includes the construction of the BioBrick BBa_K4129026, a transient expression platform (TEP) for expression in A. niger. The plasmid consists of a strong constitutive promoter, a USER site and a terminator. The backbone further has AMA1, pyrG, ori and ampR, allowing for selection using ampicillin resistance and pyrG deficient strains. This plasmid has shown to work well in expressing inserted genes, and is easily modified via USER cloning, making it easy to insert and test many different genes using this TEP.
Software pipelines for use in transcriptome analysis and in silico protein design
We have created and released two pipelines that can be used by other iGEM teams to analyze transcriptome data analysis and in-silico protein design. The details about the in-silico protein design pipeline can be found on the Model page. All the steps, bioinformatics tools, and codes are documented. The document to run the transcriptome data analysis pipeline can be found here and the document to run in silico protein design pipeline can be found here. These documents will be helpful for future iGEM teams that want to use our pipelines for their project.
Securing easy-to-use and versatile education in synthetic biology
DTU BioBuilders 2022 have made great efforts into securing good educations in synthetic biology, most importantly in an attempt to increase the engagement in STEM teachings in general. To this extent, it is also important for us to share our learnings and creations with future iGEM teams and beyond, allowing everyone to benefit from our work. Thus, all slideshows are available for download in English, accompanied by a sheet containing notes/guidelines for each slide page. Further, everything needed to set up a game of BioBuilders (board, rule document, event cards, persona cards etc.) are downloadable in an easy-to-use manner.