Judging/Variance/Newcastle

Team Request
Dear iGEM judges,

I would like to submit a request for variance for Team:Newcastle for the 2009 competition.

As you're probably aware many teams are now synthesising functional components de novo to avoid lengthy cloning steps when lab time is limited. One of the iGEM sponsors is GENEART, which has an iGEM offer and supplies its synthesised parts in a number of standard vectors.

GENEART supplies about 80% of constructs are in either pMA or pMK backbones. We have parts that have been supplied in pMK backbones.

We understand already from the iGEM wiki that "since teams are required to submit parts in a Registry-supported plasmid backbone, you will have to transfer your GENEART-sythesized part into an acceptable plasmid backbone. Keep this in mind when planning your gene synthesis schedule."

We feel however that if GENEART is going to continue to offer special offers to the competition it would facilitate the process greatly if the synthesised constructs could be submitted directly to the repository in the standard backbones that they supply. Our team is simply introducing required cloning sites to these synthesised bricks during subsequent PCR steps prior to subcloning.

This would eliminate uneccessary cloning steps in the lab (especially close to the end of the competition) and speed up part deposition to the repository in order to help it grow, therefore we would ask that this variance be made.

regards,

Daniel Swan (on behalf of the Newcastle 2009 iGEM team)