Partnership with Cornell: Overview
We first reached out to the Cornell iGEM team in June to discuss a potential collaboration between the two teams because we were both interested in working with hydrogels as part of our projects. We had an introductory meeting where both teams gave a brief introduction to our respective projects and brainstormed aspects of our projects that we can collaborate on. We decided that our teams could collaborate on wet lab as well as our education and outreach efforts. We also decided to meet in person in July to give a more thorough introduction to each other’s project. Our teams also decided to maintain regular contact from June to October to continue with our partnership.
In-person meeting with Cornell iGEM
After our previous zoom meeting with Cornell iGEM, we decided to meet in person with them in their lab space. Our visit started with a lab tour, where we were introduced to the wet-lab facility that the Cornell iGEM team has access to. We also learned a lot about how the Cornell team structured their lab schedule as well as how they sterilized their equipments.
Afterward, we each gave a more detailed presentation on our projects and held a question and answer session. The Cornell team gave us some useful feedback on our presentations, which helped us make it more clear for our intended audience. For example, they wanted to know more about our glucometer electrode design, which helped us realize that we should provide more technical information when presenting. We also did the same thing for Cornell by suggesting that they could include more information on how their bio-reactor design works to produce their bio-ink so that an audience would have a clearer understanding of how it works. Afterwards, the two teams enjoyed a great ice cream social on a hot summer day!
Co-facilitating Big Brother Big Sister event
Both our team and the Cornell iGEM teams are very excited about our efforts to present various topics in synthetic biology to our local communities in an accessible way. Therefore, we decided to help the Cornell team in their outreach initiative by co-facilitating a Big Brother Big Sister event in Ithaca, New York. The event aims to introduce an audience of ages 8 - 45 to synthetic biology through educational and interactive activities. We held a booth with our Bacterial Superheroes activity which adds to the variety of activities that the participants can do at the event alongside Cornell iGEM team’s activities (refer to our Educations page). Having the synergy between the two teams activities was imperative to the event’s success. The Cornell team hosted an activity that utilized lego bricks to introduce participants to the idea of biobricks, which complimented our Bacterial Superheroes activity very well. Participants could first start at Cornell’s station to learn about the concept of biobricks and then move on to our station where they get to discover how biobricks are integrated into bacterial plasmids. The order of the activities can work in reverse as well, where the event attendees can have a general idea of the gene insertion process from our team’s activity and then learn about building biobricks from Cornell’s activity. Overall, we were able to successfully collaborate with the Cornell iGEM team to introduce synthetic biology to a general audience who are the participants of the Big Brother Big Sister match event in Ithaca, NY, USA.
Wet-lab collaboration
During our first meeting with the Cornell iGEM team, they mentioned that they were having some trouble with their 3D-printing bioink. We gladly helped them by placing them in contact with our advisor, Dr. Anne Meyer, who is an expert in the field of 3D bioprinting. The Cornell team received advice from Dr. Meyer regarding their 3D bioprinting protocols and bio-ink chemistry, which helped them improve their bioprinter design as well as the composition of their hydrogel. She suggested that the team should consider replacing the needle of their printer to a micropipette tip or a blunt-end one. The adjustment allowed for a more precise extrusion of their hydrogel from their 3D bioprinter. The Cornell team also received advice from Dr. Meyer regarding the programming of their 3D printer. From our advisor’s input, they decided to go with making small adjustments to a pre-existing 3D printing program instead of creating their own program from scratch, which helped to save a lot of time for them with regards to their software development. Finally, Dr. Meyer also advised them to try using alginate in making their hydrogel as that is what she uses in her own research lab and she also gave the Cornell team general suggestions on hydrogel composition. The two teams also did a hydrogel protocol exchange to peer-review each other’s hydrogel-making protocols.
We also provided them with 2 Escherichia coli strains to assist them with making the bio-ink for their project. One of the strains carried a plasmid that would express constitutive green fluorescent protein (GFP) and inducible csgA, while the other strain served as a negative control, expressing constitutive GFP only. csgA codes for the protein CsgA - a major component of the curli protein, which plays an important role in biofilm formation in the extracellular matrix. The curli protein is a significant portion of the Cornell iGEM team’s project as it is the major component in the hydrogel that Cornell is using to make their bio-ink. Thanks to our contributions, they were able to add the color yellow to the list of colors (originally red, blue, and purple) that can be printed using their 3D-bioprinter. We can’t wait to see the cool bioart that they are going to create with our contribution to their project!
Participating in In Vitro mini-Jamboree hosted by Cornell, McGill, and Concordia iGEM teams
The Cornell, McGill, and Concordia iGEM teams partnered up to host the In Vitro mini-Jamboree event on August 20-21, 2022 which we were invited to present at. We gave a 15-minute presentation of our project to a panel of experts at the event. The feedback that we received from the judges was very helpful and constructive, which helped us to better our presentation. For example, the judges suggested that we add more graphs and charts to represent data instead of table of numbers. By adding more visual representation, the audience would more easily detect trends and correlation relationships in our data. The event was very beneficial in helping us to prepare for the Grand Jamboree in October. We would like to thank the Cornell, McGill, and Concordia iGEM teams for hosting this wonderful event.
