Team:Newcastle/Collaborations
Exeter
Team Exeter kindly helped us by conducting thermal conductivity experiments on LB and M9 media. These were important in allowing us to correctly model the temperature change caused by running an electric current through common bacterial growth media. They found that the conductivity of both M9 and LB to be very similar to that of water. Whilst water has a thermal conductivity of 598.4 mW/Km (miliwatts per metre kelvin) at room temperature Exeter found that LB has a slightly higher thermal conductivity at 605 (+/- 20) mW/Km and M9 a slightly lower thermal conductivity of 570 (+/- 30) mW/Km.
This data was incorporated into our modelling and helped us identify which media to use in our later conductivity experiments. It also gave us some useful pointers for exploring other fluids with different specific heat capacities. Thanks Exeter!
Westminster meet up
On the 17-18th of August a half of Newcastle University iGEM 2016 team went to UK iGEM teams meet up in University of Westminster where we had to display our poster and make the presentation.
The presentation went well, but a few improvements could be made. First of all, the clear structure of the presentation that had separate sections for introduction, microfluidics and breadboard, genetics and human practices worked well. We will try to make our next presentation very structural as well. Also, a breadboard design picture should be included in order to help people visualize how our final product looks like. Our human practices part looked very integrative and different compared with other teams and now we should continue and actually develop a human practices simulator. Finally, chronological order in some parts of the presentation such as human practices were easy for listeners to understand and follow so we are planning to use this approach in other parts of our presentation.
The poster was received positively as well. However, when comparing ours with the ones of other teams we have indicated a few areas which could be improved. First of all, our poster could have contained less text and maybe bullet points to make it more attractive. By reducing the amount of text in the poster we are also able to make the heading and text larger. Finally, we would like to make the sections of our final poster more separate than before. Even though this poster had a better separation than the previous one, the components description were a little bit scattered and thus harder to follow.
IWDBA 2016
Whilst half of our Team was at the Westminster iGEM meetup the others half were in Newcastle attending IWBDA 2016, the international workshop on biodesign automation. There we heard from a number of researchers in fields related to synthetic biology and were able to explain our idea to them on order to get feedback. We found that the feedback was positive once people fully understood our idea but that we were not explaining our end product, the plug and play kit, very well. We resolved to make better use of props such as the existing electronics kits for children at future presentation opportunities. Whilst gathering feedback on our idea we were fortunate to find someone working on the same area, but from the opposite end - using electronics to sense signals from the bacteria. In particular, Luis Ortiz of Boston University was using pH probes to sense the bacteria and integrate this information into a computer system. He gave us useful information on altering the pH of a growth media using bacteria which is something we investigated further as an alternative way of changing the resistance of our growth media in our various 'resistor' constructs. We also heard from researchers working on new micofluidics fabrication techniques involving the etching of plastics rather than moulding PDMS. We investigated this further when considering our 'environmental responsibility' from both a human practices and safety perspective.
Whilst at IWBDA we also had the pleasure of meeting the 2016 Leiden iGEM team and to hear about their idea and discuss the progress of both our projects.
Edinburgh
