Contribution
Our contribution is the creation of new well documented parts, that we deposited in the iGEM registry. We documented a wide range of parts, which include new chitinases with different activities: endochitinase and exochitinase, and new signal peptides for usage in species. In the parts pages, we included all the information that can help future teams choose the best option for their goal, taken from the literature and from our lab experiences.
We also registered the detailed protocols that we used in the project development in the page Experiments, which will be useful for future teams that want to reproduce any of our experiments. Because we changed routes a few times in the project and because we worked with different organisms, we adapted and provided various protocols: for Lactobacillus acidophilus, for E. coli, for fungi. With them, we hope to help many teams with diverse projects and ideas.
In partnership with team Chassei, which worked with the same chassi genre (Lactobacillus), we figured out how to overcome the problems we were having for its transformation. Our discussions about these difficulties resulted in a Transformation protocol. Lactobacillus has a great potential, but the lack of information about its manipulation in the laboratory, besides the lack of characterization of its genetic parts put barriers to its use. With the protocol developed, future iGEM teams that aim to use lactobacilli can easily access a reproducible protocol to succeed in their chassis transformation. This protocol is also available in Experiments.
We uploaded our code in GitLab with unrestricted access, so future teams may use our mathematical assembly to predict feasibility of their therapeutic project, continue to improove it or even adapt it to other purposes.
Every year LATAM iGEM teams deal with shipping problems of the iGEM kit and genetic parts, besides the high cost of the competition. With the objective to communicate these problems and solve them with the iGEM competition organization, we participated in the development of this letter with other 2022 LATAM teams. With this contribution, we aim to create a better scenario for the next LATAM iGEM teams, for them to receive the needed genetics parts in time, for them to be able to conclude the project development, and for more fair prices to participate more often in the competition.