Judging/Variance/Heidelberg

Request
Dear iGem judging team,

I am writing on behalf of the Heidelberg igem team. This year, we'll be trying to contribute parts to the registry optimized for the use in human cells. Our parts will for example feature standardized genome insertion using a FRT site and tags for targetting proteins to different cell compartments.

For a multitude of reasons, we would like to work with the BBb2 standard proposal as described by Tom Knight on http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/45139/BBFRFC12.txt. Our main reasons for this are as follows:
 * BBa does not enable protein fusions.
 * Most standards include a XbaI site. The original FRT site as used by most researchers also contains a XbaI site. We are aware of Berkeley 2008 using a mutated FRT site, but we are unsure as to its efficiency and would therefore prefer to try both versions of the FRT site.
 * Most importantly, our team would like to test and develop standards for the use in a new system (higher eukaryotes - mammalians). As part of this effort, we would like to test the recently proposed BBb2 standard as we believe that BBa has severe shortcoming and will thus probably be discontinued in the foreseeable future. Of all standards described so far, BBb2 appears to be the strongest to us. Of course, our project's work would involve a detailled description of the BBb2 standard's performance.

Sincerely,

Lars

Response
Lars,

Request approved. Thanks for your concise and thoughtful email.

Best, Tom Richard & Drew Endy