Team:Paris Bettencourt/Collaboration

   The Paris-Bettencourt-Calgary iGEM collaboration started last June when a few members from each team met at the SB6.0 synbio conference in London. After a few beers and lab stories, we learned that despite coming from the opposite sides of the globe, we were using synthetic biology to build biosensors to sense DNA. While our systems were targeted solve different problems, we were struck by a number of commonalities between these projects (Figure 1). As we shared our projects, we recalled how there was a lack of DNA biosensor parts in the Parts Registry. Moreover, we complained about the lack of organization of biosensors in the registry. The veteran iGEMers on each team mentioned that biosensors had consistently finished as grand prize winners in previous years of iGEM.

   We decided to collaborate to answer these questions. Since our initial meeting in London, members of each team have conferenced weekly on Skype. After accustoming ourselves to the eight hour time difference, we developed SensiGEM, a collaborative database in which we catalogued all the biosensors in the history of iGEM.

Before studying the past Wikis, we realized that we had different definitions of biosensors. We asked each other a fundamental question: What is a biosensor? We developed the following definition: A biosensor is an engineered system that relies on biological systems or components to detect and report a condition. The condition(s) detected and reported could encompass an environmental, biological, chemical or synthetic aspect or compound in the sensor’s environment or surroundings. Once agreeing on the nature of biosensors, we split up the Wikis from 2007 onward between Calgary and Paris-Bettencourt. We analyzed 936 project Wikis from 2007 to 2013 by hand, incorporating the projects which matched our biosensor definition into the collaborative SensiGEM database. We included 229 projects on

   We conducted some preliminary analysis of the database in SensiGEM to see how our projects stand in the current iGEM biosensor landscape as well as to get an overview of what types of biosensors have been developed for iGEM.
In Figure 2, we can see the portion of biosensors of all iGEM projects since 2007. There is a clear linear increase in number of iGEM projects, but the number of biosensors per year varies and doesn’t follow a trend.
How successful Biosensor were in the previous years (Advance to Championship, Awards, Finalists) can be seen in Figure 3. Something that also interested us was to see how many biosensors are in the Track Health and Medicine as we developed a biosensor for that Category (Figure 4). Other facts we wanted get from the database are, how many biosensors already targeted DNA (Figure 5) and what is the distribution of other inputs, sensed by previous biosensors (Figure 6).

   Given the similarities between each of our systems in overall function, we have begun development of BioBricks to apply each system to the other team's problem. By testing each system on a different problem, we intend to show how each system can be deployed as a modular, platform technology.

A critical part of BGU's project requires a recombination of a linear DNA cassette into the bacterial chromosome. They sent a cassette required for the recombination as well as the helper plasmid required for it to function. They sent us their plasmid pUC57amp-cI which is responsible for the repression of the holin and lysozyme genes in their kill switch. As the repression of these genes is essential to prevent the kill switch from being lethal prematurely, we decided to characterize the promoter units produced by the lac/ara-1 promoter that the cI is controlled by.

Jonas Zantow an advisor of the Braunschweig iGEM Team from Germany visited us in Paris. We we showed him our lab and we gave him a quick overview of our projects and what we achieved so far. Also Jonas explained us what the Braunschweig 2013 iGEM Team

Important for the success of our cooperation was to regularly see each other on Skype. It is way easier to talk in person than to communicate by mail as misunderstandings and questions could be solved directly. We used Asana.com to set up tasks for each team that completed until the next week. Setting up those weekly tasks was a good idea as we were not overwhelmed by a lot of work but having those small tasks we could process them in time. Also the splitting up of work, as we did for example for the Wikis, was very helpful and part of the success to reach our goal in time.