Collaborations

Collaborations

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Introduction

Throughout our project, we have established several collaborations with other iGEM teams, the main ones are further detailed here. In order to test our tool as much as possible within the time of the competition, we decided to approach other IGEM teams. Considering that many past iGEM teams used Toehold we believed we were able to contribute to more current iGEM teams. Several teams replied to us and a few collaborations were created.

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Aboa's iGEM team

First, a strong partnership has been formed with Aboa team from Finland. In this collaboration, we optimized Toehold sequences for them, which were planned to be expressed in E. coli and they worked on validating the integrity of those sequences through wet-lab experiments. Even though our main focus was not on E. coli as our experimental model, we have made the necessary adaptations in our algorithms. They shared with us a rating metric they used in their project which helped us to improve our own rating system. Moreover, we exchanged feedback and experiences with them concerning the challenges we must overcome while dealing with lab and modeling works.

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Waterloo's iGEM team

We have also arranged a zoom meeting with the Waterloo team from Canada. We gave feedback concerning their project and got feedback regarding our project, in order to implement new insights and ideas while designing and generating our tool.

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Israeli Mini Jamboree

Moreover, we participated at the Isreali Mini-Jamboree, organized and hosted by the Technion_Israel team - AngelRoots. In addition to excellent professional and academic contents transferred throughout the conference, each team has presented its project and has given feedback to the others’ teams. Thus, we were able to gain even more new insights and ideas related to our project and implement them accordingly.

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BGU Israel - Asensa

Following the mini-jamboree, we have formed an additional contact with the BGU_Israel team - Asensa - to consider new collaboration. We had a zoom meeting in which we presented our projects and shared our thoughts about each others’ projects. Additionally, they kindly suggested performing a wet-lab experiment for us. We generated a list of toehold switch sequences and ranked them using our ranking metric and linear regressor. We sent them the sequences and as to this point, we are waiting for the results, hoping that the wet-lab results will correspond to our ranking and validate our metric and regressor.