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From 2010.igem.org

Collaboration

Mexico UNAM-Genomics

Our collaborators on this project were Mexico UNAM-Genomics, who have been absolute stars this summer and supplied us with half the things this project needed to actually work in any way.

In early July it became apparent that Mexico were doing exactly the same project on bacterial light communication as we were. And when I say exactly, I mean down to each individual biobrick. Of course, we first panicked, then decided, since we were never going to complete this project ourselves, that we should contact them. This we did, and immediately emailed them.

It turned out that Mexico had seen our project too and were also interested in collaboration. We held a Skype conference in mid July to discuss where to take the project. Both teams wanted to hold their own in the project as appearing too dependant on another team may have hurt our chances at the Jamboree. The agreement was to share DNA, some characterisation data and any hints and tips that we picked up but to otherwise continue working as before.

The parts

By the time we had our Skype conference, Mexico had already ordered several genes from Mr. Gene. As it seemed they had a larger synthesis budget than we did, they very generously offered to send us them when they arrived. All of the genes were mutation-free and codon optimised for E.coli
These were:
YFP - the protein we were originally going to fuse with luxAB to produce yellow light. We have since decided to use the natural firefly luciferase, but Mexico are still working on this fusion.
LovTap - we were having problems with LovTap at the time. We later discovered a frameshift mutation in the BioBrick. It cost us several weeks but luckily Mexico's copy got to us just in time.