iGem community

Over the course of our summer we have thoroughly enjoyed being a part of the iGEM community. We were lucky enough to spend almost every day with the Edinburgh University Overgrad Team as we shared a lab, and even luckier to meet so many great teams at the Northern and UK Meet-up.

Babbling about our poster at the UK meet-up in London.

We invited all the Scottish teams + Newcastle to Edinburgh for the Northern Meet-up! Good times, good presentations, and good Pizza!

One of the best things about meeting new teams was discussing ideas with them, and being able to have ideas to help other teams. From this set up a few collaborations:

Dundee University

The lovely Dundee team are working on antimicrobial resistance, and looking at a way to combat it using GM bacteria in feed for farm animals. This would obviously be of huge importance to the food industry and members of the public, and so understanding potential arguments for and against it would be useful. With Dundee we arranged a debate between the debating teams of both universities, hosted in Edinburgh debating hall. This event was well attended, and received great feedback from the attendees.

In the audience was a lot biology students who may well be working in this field in the future. The response from them was useful to Dundee iGEM team as part of their human practices.

Newcastle University

This summer, the iGEM team at Newcastle had the brilliant idea to research biological alternatives to electrical circuitry. As we’re sure many iGEM teams encounter throughout the course of their project, with the advancement of synthetic biology comes very difficult and abstract questions about ethics and policy. As part of their human practices the Newcastle team wanted to create a ‘thought-experiment’ game to simulate the questions that they had encountered this summer and get people to think differently about their project.

One area where we ran into many difficult questions was during the development of our encryption. During the summer we came up with many scenarios and had to answer difficult questions about why we wanted to incorporate encryption and when it is appropriate. Our own thought process, coupled with Newcastle’s idea for an interactive game gave rise to the perfect collaboration!

We helped Newcastle incorporate an extra ‘level’ to their game by sharing our experiences and conversations with encryption experts. We also shared with them details of our encryption method so that they could use it in their game and event consider it’s use in light of their biological circuitry.