Team:TU-Eindhoven/Thoughts

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Issues concerning Material Transfer Agreement

We obtained the plasmids for the GECO proteins (Zhao et al. 2011) via Addgene. Addgene is a non-profit organization which is dedicated to providing the scientific community with access to plasmid research tools. The nominal fee for ordering plasmids is used to cover operating costs and improve the repository. There is no fee for depositing plasmids. All requests through Addgene require a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA), covered under the Uniform Biological Material Transfer Agreement (UBMTA). By signing this MTA, we were not directly able to distribute our GECO-BioBricks to the Registry.

The MTA only allows distribution of modified plasmids to nonprofit organizations for research and teaching purposes only. This distribution to a third party will require a new MTA. However, both the Registry as well as iGEM do not make use of MTAs. Once we found out about this dilemma, we feared we would not be able to send in our GECO-BioBricks to the Registry.

Luckily, however, there is one way to avoid the dilemma by asking the providing scientist, Robert Campbell from the University of Alberta, for permission to distribute the modified GECO-plasmids to the Registry. His respond to our request was: “You have my permission to add the GECO variants to the Registry. I would just ask that our paper describing them (Zhao et. al 2011) is cited in any published work that involves the use of the GECOs.” We hereby would like to thank Robert Campbell for his permission to add the GECO-BioBricks to the Registry! Although both Addgene and the Registry provide service to non-profit organizations and aim to help scientists around the world, there are subtle differences. Addgene is not completely open-source and requires MTAs for distributing their plasmids. The Registry, however, does not make use of MTAs. It is interesting to experience these differences in the world of science and does make one wonder whether a general set of rules or guidelines should be enforced.

References

• Zhao, Y. et al. ''An Expanded Palette of Genetically Encoded Ca2+ Indicators'' in ''Science'' 30 September 2011, Vol. 333 no. 6051 pp. 1888-1891, DOI: 10.1126/science.1208592