Giant Jamboree/Workshops
WORKSHOPS
Be a part of the Giant Jamboree!
In addition to the main portion of the Jamboree which is the team presentations and posters, we will be offering workshop sessions on the latest opportunities, trends and advancements in synthetic biology.
We are proud to introduce the following WORKSHOPS for the 2016 Giant Jamboree.
Please refer to the event program for updates.
iGEM Community Workshops
High School Team Lunch and Learn
Hosted by iGEM
High school team members and advisors, bring your box lunches to this facilitated discussion. Join students from around the world to network and develop ideas to enrich the iGEM experience for the unique needs of high school teams. Bring your best ideas to share and any lab hacks that you've developed to overcome equipment challenges. Meet your new best iGEM friends from around the world and make contacts for your next year's collaboration.
AlumniGEM Mentorship Workshop
Hosted by iGEM
Come learn about the AlumniGEM Mentorship Program! We paired thirteen mentors with thirteen teams that were mostly either brand new to iGEM or had participated for the first time last year. These teams and mentors will share their experiences, and we will use their comments and yours to expand and improve upon our program for iGEM 2017. We’ll start the session off with a short summary of what the program has accomplished, hear from those who participated in it this year, discuss the future of the mentorship program, and then host an open discussion of iGEM mentorship in general. If you are looking to start or continue a new team, share iGEM mentorship ideas, and give back to the iGEM community, then we highly encourage you to attend!
Structural Engineering Challenge
Hosted by iGEM
Design and build a construct. Most impressive structure wins a prize!
Do you have what it takes to build a skyscraper? Come and work with other iGEMers to use your creativity and engineering skills to design and build a tower with fun building materials. You’ll have 30 minutes to work on your structure and then present it to the group.
Diversity in Science
Hosted by iGEM
What are the problems facing minorities (of all types!) in science, and what can iGEMers do to fix them? This workshop will highlight issues and solutions for diversity in the scientific community with a focus on women and LGBT. iGEM Director of Development Kim de Mora will discuss how a diversity analysis performed by the Paris Bettencourt 2013 iGEM team has led to changes in the composition of iGEM judges. There will be lightning networking and brainstorming sessions, personal experiences from the panel members, and an interactive discussion with the audience members.
Panelists:
Dr. Anne Meyer, TU Delft (Moderator)
Dr. Christina Agapakis, Ginkgo Bioworks
Alyssa Henning, Arizona State University
Aaron Heuckroth, Giant Otter
Dr. Kim de Mora, iGEM Foundation
iGEM at the United Nations
Hosted by iGEM
The thirteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP 13), the eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (COP/MOP 8) will take place in Mexico during December of 2016.
Synthetic biology will be one topics reviewed during this event. The decision that the participants make could have a heavy impact in research worldwide. iGEM Headquarters will be participating in the COP/MOP. Come learn about the COP/MOP and discuss iGEM's plans for attending this important event.
InterLab Study
Hosted by iGEM
The iGEM interlab study is the largest scientific replication project in all of synthetic biology. It is intended to be both a significant collective scientific project and a fun educational experience. In this workshop, we will discuss the goals and implementation of this year’s interlab study, with the aim of figuring out how to make it even better next year. We’ll also present the results from this year’s interlay and compare them to the previous studies. This workshop invites all teams who participated in the interlab study, are interested in participating in the future, or who are interested in issues around scientific replication to come and share your thoughts!
Networking Bingo
Hosted by iGEM
After a successful event last year, Networking Bingo will return during the Friday evening special events session! If you’re looking for an opportunity to meet many fellow iGEMers, team advisors and industry affiliates, you should plan to attend this session. Participants will be given Bingo sheets with questions about iGEM and it will be your mission to get answers for all of them from someone else in the room. You will need to find someone from another team that meets each requirement and get them to sign your sheet. Prizes will be awarded!
Latin American Lunch
Hosted by iGEM
Latin America teams, bring your box lunches to this feedback session! Teams can share their experience and network with the other teams from the egion. This session is open to everyone.
Synthetic Biology Engineering Challenge
Hosted by iGEM and Twist Bioscience
Design and build a synthetic biology solution to an unusual problem. Best solution wins a prize!
Can you be the hero your city needs? Come and work with other iGEMers to use your syn bio engineering skills to design a creative solution to a science fiction dilemma. You’ll have 30 minutes to work on your solution and present it to the group.
Mammalian Synthetic Biology at iGEM: Peril and Promise
Hosted by iGEM
Undertaking a mammalian synthetic biology project as an iGEM team is not for the faint of heart: there are fewer well-characterized parts available, the assembly steps can be more demanding, and maintaining, transfecting and characterizing mammalian cells is resource-intensive. On the other hand, mammalian synthetic biology is at the cutting edge of biomedical research, allowing iGEM teams to address problems in health and medicine that would be difficult to approach in prokaryotic or single-cell eukaryotic systems. This workshop will begin with a summary of our experiences leading several iGEM teams that have undertaken mammalian synthetic biology projects, followed by an extended period for questions and conversation between those working in the mammalian SynBio space and those considering entering it.
Meetup Workshop
Hosted by iGEM
Did you host an iGEM Meetup this year and want to share your experience with a larger group of iGEMers? Did you attend a Meetup and have feedback about it? Do you want to learn about hosting a meetup for next year? Come join us for an open discussion about running meetups! This workshop will collect tips and tricks for organizing an iGEM Meetup for future teams to use.
Career Fair
Hosted by iGEM
As part of the iGEM 2016 Giant Jamboree weekend, iGEM is hosting a career fair event on Sunday, October 30 to foster relationships within the synthetic biology community. This unique opportunity offers top employers a chance to meet with iGEM participants and discuss career opportunities.
Be sure to bring plenty of copies of your resume or CV.
Exhibitors:
- FBI
- GenScript
- Ginko Bioworks
- Twist Biosciences
- University of Edinburgh
- Modern Meadow
Sponsored Workshops
SynBio Solutions
Hosted by Agilent
Discover technologies that accelerate the Synthetic Biology revolution. From the SureVector Next Generation Cloning System, providing user-friendly customization of cloning and expression vectors in a 20-minute reaction, to the QuikChange HT Protein Engineering System, enabling rapid creation of libraries of rationally designed mutants, to CRISPR/cas9 research tools and more.
Genetic Constructor: A high powered, cloud based, extensible, open source CAD tool to drive biological design
Hosted by Autodesk
The BioNano Research Group at Autodesk, in collaboration with the Edinburgh Genome Foundry, is releasing an extensible, open source, cloud CAD tool to drive biological design and complex DNA construction. Living systems are robust biological machines that can be reprogrammed to produce valuable products such as fuels, chemicals, and therapeutics. The current software toolbox for genetic design offers solutions that are either relatively good but too expensive for scientists unless they are at large companies, or low cost but relatively low powered and quite limited. A different approach, requiring high fidelity at low cost is necessary as more scientists want to design and build higher numbers of increasingly complex constructs. Genetic Constructor works at higher levels of abstraction than current software packages, in order to empower scientists to program organisms with higher efficiency and increasing complexity, and will integrate with DNA Foundries seamlessly to produce those designs. Unlike other high power tools in this space, our software will be open source and freely available to the community. It is also cloud based and built with a plug-in architecture to allow for customization and increasing levels of complexity.
In this workshop, we will:
- Demo the tool to the iGEM community
- Showcase some of its capabilities
- Discuss future directions
- Illustrate how to interact with the tool from a biology and a software development perspective
Who should attend: Biologists who want to design things. Computer scientists who want to contribute to a growing open source project.
Discover bionet!
Hosted by The BioBricks Foundation
What if iGEM could happen all the time everywhere?
The BioBricks Foundation is developing the bionet -- an open technology platform for peer-to-peer exchange and provenance tracking of biomaterials and associated data. Our goal is to reduce transaction costs associated with inventory tracking, sample replication, and shipping and receiving by combining modern information technologies with newly available and affordable open source automation platforms. We are also developing a property rights framework that will enable sharing and reuse of biomaterials without triggering extra-bionet transaction costs.
At this workshop you will:
- See first generation bionet hardware
- Experience the bionet user interface
- Chat with bionet developers about future directions
- Learn about the OpenMTA and BPAv2.0 for biomaterials exchange
Safe by design in synthetic biology
Dutch National Institute of Health and the Environment (RIVM)
Your projects are at the beginning of the innovation process. We, the Dutch National Institute for Health and the Environment, think that this is the right time for you to think about safety. In this workshop we challenge you to think about the implementation of ‘safe-by-design’ principles in your projects. What is safety? How do you determine what ‘safe’ actually is, especially when it is a new product? Is it enough to work under safe conditions in the lab and building in technical safety measures in microorganism like kill-switches? Are there other safety aspects in the product life cycle? How do you consider them? What are the technical options to make an application or microorganism safe (safe-by-design)? Who decides what is safe? Who is involved in the decision-making process of safety aspects? How do others perceive safety? And do they trust decision-makers? How far do you have to go as iGEM-student with thinking and acting on safety? Where does someone’s responsibility start and end?
Safeguarding Science and the Future
Hosted by the FBI
Meet with the FBI and participate in a discussion on the shared responsibility to protect the life sciences as a member of law enforcement or the synthetic biology community (whether you’re an iGEM’er, scientist, biohacker, investor, business person, or all of the above). Find out what it means to be a guardian of science.
CRISPR gene editing: how it works and how to use it
Hosted by GenScript
Named the 2015 Breakthrough of the Year, CRISPR/Cas9 has made efficient gene editing available to any lab, and has accelerated research across multiple disciplines. Since its adaptation for mammalian cell line editing, the technology has evolved at a very fast pace, and keeping up with the different CRISPR options can be a challenge.
In this workshop, we will discuss how CRISPR has evolved and what reagents work best for which applications. We will also describe some tips and tricks for getting the most out of CRISPR in your experiments.
Modeling Synthetic Biology Systems with MATLAB and SimBiology
Hosted by MathWorks
Mathematical modelling guides rational design of genetic modifications and enables synthetic biologists to better analyze and predict system behavior prior to fabrication. Modeling is an important part of synthetic biology and the iGEM competition.
This workshop will provide iGEM teams with an introduction to modeling, simulation, and analysis with MATLAB and SimBiology using an example from synthetic biology literature.
Highlights include:
- Using graphical environment to build models of biological systems
- Simulating dynamics using ordinary differential equation (ODE) solvers
- Interactively exploring model sensitivity to parameters
- Streamlining model exploration via parameter sweeps and sensitivity analyses
- Extending modeling environment by running custom analyses
Looking Ahead: Strategies for doing and communicating your research
Hosted by PLOS
Aaron Dy, a PhD student in Biological Engineering at MIT and PLOS Synbio Community Editor, will present his experience as a PhD student in doing and communicating synthetic biology research. Then he'll summarize reports from the PLOS iGEM collection and discuss how these exciting iGEM projects connect to the overall trends in synthetic biology and publishing. Finally, he’ll emphasize the importance of both research and research communication to advancing a young scientific career. PLOS' Nathaniel Gore will explain how PLOS is working with iGEM to showcase research from the 2015 and 2016 Jamboree-winning teams.
Looking Ahead: Strategies for publishing your results
Hosted by PLOS
Need help getting started on your iGEM report or do you just want to know more about the scientific publishing process? Join PLOS staff, Michelle Dohm and Nathaniel Gore as they introduce the concepts and process behind the handling of research articles, from first submission to final publication and how that is changing as a result of new technology and novel ways of collaborating and critiquing work. The discussion will be followed by a demonstration on structuring your iGEM report, with helpful tips and advice on science writing and preparing your manuscript.
Human Practices in Action: The iGEMer’s Guide to the Future (mosquito borne diseases)
Hosted by Synenergene
Do you have an synbio innovation you think can make a difference in the world? We can help you turn your good idea into a great idea with added societal value. Join us at the launch of ‘The iGEMers Guide to The Future’ to find out about a free and open access web-based tool that can support your innovation process!
With the help of The iGEMers Guide to The Future, you will be able to develop an application scenario and a techno-moral vignette to assess both the feasibility and the desirability of your future technology. With these, you gain a deeper and broader understanding of your innovation’s context. This is real-time technology assessment and it allows you to modify or add features to your product to bring it from a good idea to a relevant idea. By using it in your development, you will actually be integrating human practices in your iGEM team work!
Curious to hear more?
We are excited to welcome you at The iGEMers Guide to The Future launch event. There, you will hear experiences from current iGEM teams, and see the tool in action around the issue of the fight against mosquito borne diseases.
The iGEMers Guide to The Future was developed in the course of a collaboration with iGEM and SYNENERGENE partners. The goal of this collaboration was to develop a process to support teams in reflecting on the potential and implications of their design work and envisioned implications. This tool is the result of our experiences. After the launch event, it will be available on the iGEM website for all future iGEM teams.
Human Practices in Action: The iGEMer’s Guide to the Future (conservation issues)
Hosted by Synenergene
Do you have an synbio innovation you think can make a difference in the world? We can help you turn your good idea into a great idea with added societal value. Join us at the launch of ‘The iGEMers Guide to The Future’ to find out about a free and open access web-based tool that can support your innovation process!
With the help of The iGEMers Guide to The Future, you will be able to develop an application scenario and a techno-moral vignette to assess both the feasibility and the desirability of your future technology. With these, you gain a deeper and broader understanding of your innovation’s context. This is real-time technology assessment and it allows you to modify or add features to your product to bring it from a good idea to a relevant idea. By using it in your development, you will actually be integrating human practices in your iGEM team work!
Curious to hear more?
We are excited to welcome you at The iGEMers Guide to The Future launch event. There, you will hear experiences from current iGEM teams, and see the tool in action with regard to dealing with conservation issues.
The iGEMers Guide to The Future was developed in the course of a collaboration with iGEM and SYNENERGENE partners. The goal of this collaboration was to develop a process to support teams in reflecting on the potential and implications of their design work and envisioned implications. This tool is the result of our experiences. After the launch event, it will be available on the iGEM website for all future iGEM teams.
Discovering Synergy Between Farms and Society
Hosted by Syngenta
Food security is a major challenge for the world today and we all seem to want the same thing: more abundant and nutritious food to help us rid hunger. The opportunity to meet this goal is alive in agricultural innovations meant to feed more people per hectare, while reducing stress on the land, animals and environment. However, widening technological and social complexities leave farmers facing trade-offs with fewer potential win-win solutions.
One possible win-win that does exist--Biocontrols--is a method of using the power of natural biology to reach a desired result in the field. Biocontrols are an effective solution to bridge societal expectations for food and the productivity a grower needs. As with any great tool, the challenge is finding a balance between scaling up the use of this highly effective agricultural tool while also being able to clearly demonstrate its value.
This workshop will present scenarios developed by the following iGEM teams and provide a forum for discussion:
- University of Lethbridge
- UCL (University College London)
Open Sessions
IDT lounge
Hosted by IDT
Hang out, relax, and have fun in the IDT Lounge—an inviting space with comfortable seating and plenty of GIANT games for your enjoyment. Prizes and refreshments will beprovided at various times. Stop by Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 9:00 am until 6:00 pm and check it out!
Game Room
Hosted by iGEM
The Game Room is a place for students and other members of the iGEM Community to come together and relax. A selection of board games will be available in the Game Room during the Giant Jamboree. Stop by to learn a new game and meet new friends!
