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From 2012.igem.org

Welcome to our French Froggies project

We are working on this wiki along with the advancement of our project, so come again soon to see the project and the wiki evolving!

Project

Building on a long-standing French fascination for frogs, we wanted to spread this enthusiasm to the world of synthetic biology by introducing a new, vertebrate chassis to the community: Xenopus tropicalis. This leap towards multicellular biological engineering required new tools, so we first developed a new set of frog compatible vectors, biobricked tissue specific promoters and a new technique to assemble them in a single shot. To benefit from tissue compartmentalisation, we created a synthetic, orthogonal hormonal system using the plant molecule auxin. We also investigated E. coli/Xenopus interfacing, effectively creating a synthetic ecosystem. We modelled our system at the organism scale, using a multi-level and multi-technique approach. Finally, working with whole animals during iGEM brought a load of difficult ethical questions regarding animal biotechnologies and experimentation. This led us to wonder: Are we a chassis?

Visit our project to understand deeper what we are working on.

Composition of our team

The composition of our team is available. Click here to visit our team page

Acheivements

This is the list of the acheivement of our team working. Click on the elements of the lits to get to the page:

• We have created the first biobrick parts to work in Xenopus Tropicalis, and most of our new parts have enhanced expression in mammalian and other vertebrates cells
• We have developped a new methodology to model the physiology of a vertebrate at the organism scale
• We have been explorating the ethical and social impact of engineering living animals
• ... To be completed