Overview

The UCL GEM team have thoroughly enjoyed collaborating with GEM team all around the world and forming a network of synthetic biology enthusiasts just like us around the world. We have collaborated with over 69 GEM teams and received a lot of ideas and input from other teams. Scroll down to see what we have been up to!

Testing Alphabrick

Alphabrick, one of UCL iGEM 2016 entrepreneurial ideas was made by iGEM team members for iGEM teams. Our software platform would not be optimised for use unless we obtained user feedback from iGEM teams. Hence, we collaborated with over 69 iGEM teams, giving them free access to the alpha version for use in their projects.

This can help us build our software (alphabrick) made for iGEM teams! We recieved feedback from:

• ITU iGEM Team
• iGEM UPO Sevilla
• McMaster iGEM
• Purdue iGEM
• iGEM_Leiden

High school teams

We also helped the CLSB-UK iGEM team characterise one of their parts as they did not have a spectrophotometer at their high school. We measured the optical density of a culture of Synechocystis over the course of 5 days. CLSB-UK needed the optical density readings to check that their method of using a colorimeter with a particular filter was working. We obtained the started culture with the growth medium and obtained the data by incubating the culture with light with mixing. The Synechocystis we obtained data from was non-transformed with no foreign genes.

UK iGEM MEET-UP: Organised by Westminster - 18th - 19th August

Not only were we able to meet up with most of the UK iGEM teams but we also got a chance to present our project for the first time. This meant that we could start to prepare ourselves for the finals at Boston by receiving feedback on our presentation/ project from other iGEM teams at the meet up.

We also got to see what the other teams were doing such that we could organise a possible relevant collaboration. This meet up was very exciting and fun! Once our presentation was over, we asked the University of Westminster iGEM team to give us some feedback on our project. They mentioned that we should include some facts in our presentation to make the audience realise that each of our projects are important in society and the problem that they solve is an important one. Their feedback allowed us to improve the way we communicate our project to different audiences, especially those that do not have a strong synthetic biology background.

The feedback we received has really helped us rethink how we can present our project to the world in a better and clearer way. We now have a clear understanding that not everyone has the knowledge that we do about our project and the science behind it. Therefore, it is essential that we receive feedback from people who were listening to our presentation and act upon it by making our presentation clearer and easier to follow and understand. Through our iGEM journey we have found out that its essential that we focus on clear communication of our project.

Figure 1: Hana, Amandeep and Abbie before our presentation at the UK iGEM meet up!

Figure 2: Abbie presenting our project at the UK meetup!

Figure 3: Amandeep explaining our project at the poster presentations.

Figure 4: Amandeep deep in though on how we can collaborate!

International survey

UCL iGEM 2016 Collaboration survey - Using twitter to get the public opinion on synthetic biology, with the help of some iGEM teams that helped by filling out the form and re tweeting the survey! The teams that collaborated with us were:

• Imperial team
• XMU-China
• Edinburgh team
• NRP-UEA iGEM team (Biowire)
• Dundee Schools iGEM
• Team LMU and TU Munich
• Tianjin University team

Skype sessions

Meet up with Westminster team - June 23

Skype meetings/Chats

• Exeter team - July 1st
• Paris Bettencourt - July 4th
• UNL team
• Trinity team

Meet up with Imperial team - July 8th

Rice iGEM - Humans of synbio

Trinity iGEM team - UCL academy on youtube

Survey for Vilnius iGEM'16