SynBERC:MIT/Calendar/2007-6-20

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Anyone in the synthetic biology community is welcome to attend.

Wednesday June 20, 2007 at 12:30pm EST

32-D463, MIT

Topic of discussion

Melina Fan from AddGene will be leading a discussion around distribution and sharing of plasmids.

Addgene is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting sharing of plasmid constructs described in published literature. Addgene stores original plasmid samples submitted by scientists and distributes them for use in advancing life science research.

Some potential topics to discuss are

• An overview of procedures for collection, maintenance, propagation and distribution of physical plasmid samples. Do you do any quality control or sequencing of items in the repository?
• Are you in a position to cope with large collections? i.e. I have a paper about 100 or 1000 or 10000 different plasmids I made. Can I submit them to Addgene for distribution as a collection?
• Your experiences with convincing people to make their research products available through Addgene. Why are folks eager to do so? Why are folks reluctant to do so?
• How do you clear IP/MTA's around the plasmids? Have you had to pull items from the repository?
• What are the typical costs (in terms of $$ and manpower) for carrying out Addgene's basic functions of collection, maintenance and distribution?