Introduction

Throughout our iGEM journey we were faced with several challenges that future iGEM teams will experience as well. To help them, we have made some documents where we explain more about how to make your team function to its full potential and tips&tricks when it comes to organizing events. We wrote everything from our own experience. Lastly, just for fun, we have included a Spot it! game and some coloring pages that other teams can use.

Parts

We have made many new parts that can be used by teams for several applications. All of them can be found on our Parts Page and our favorite part was BBa_K4905006. We used this part to form a hydrogel inside of E. coli BL21 cells, however, we have also shown that it is possible to form a hydrogel outside of cells and that it is possible to slowly release drugs out of the gel. We think this part can be used for many applications in the future by other iGEM teams. The hydrogel formation is based on reversible interactions and it forms upon changing the temperature. This is easy to control, which is one of the reasons the part will come in handy for other teams. Furthermore, it is easy to express the proteins. We are the first iGEM team that takes this approach and uses Elastin-Like Polypeptides in such a way.

Furthermore, we have also shown that a hydrogel can be formed with rapamycin binding domains, which is a so-called molecular glue. These parts are also functional and can be used by many teams in the future. The part that worked best for this method was BBa_K4905012. The concept of both methods can be seen in Figure 1.

Lastly, The parts can easily be mixed and matched to form other ELP triblocks or other gBlocks can be put in the system at the ends of the ELPs. This makes the platform truly modular. we have also shown it is possible to co-express the ELPs with other proteins, which opens even more doors for other applications in the future!

Our teams sees many applications for these parts such as tissue engineering or making injectable hydrogels that slowly release drugs. We have tried to document our findings as well as possbile on our Parts Page and on the Results Page of each specific part. We hope many iGEM teams will make use of them in the future!

Team formation trouble shooting

To improve the way we worked together as a team, we were given the opportunity to have several meetings with John Overmans, who is a well-established businessman and a great leader. He helped us diagnose the points where we could still improve as a team and gave us practical tips that he uses in his own work as well.

We have summarized our meetings with John in the document below. We hope it contains a practical guide for which conversations to have with your team to make it function even better than it already does!

You can download the team formation pdf here.