King’s College London iGEM 2023 : Biologix
We collaborated with 7 other iGEM teams in the UK, namely King’s College London, Exeter, Edinburgh, Oxford, Sheffield, Warwick and City of London UK to craft presentation slides, videos and a short textbook, all of which are aimed at 16-19 year olds. With this material, we hope to educate students on the concept of synthetic biology, which might have been foreign to them otherwise. Each team is responsible for a different topic, with Cambridge heading the section of “Applications of Synthetic Biology”. There, we mentioned various ways in which synthetic biology has been applied industrially, such as synthetic meats (food production) and bioplastics (environment). Combined with other topics including “An Introduction to Synthetic Biology” and “iGEM and the World”, we hope to spark interest amongst the high school students, and motivate them to take part more actively in science.
Moreover, with the short videos we have each prepared, we explain our iGEM projects in a succinct and easily digestible manner, which would hopefully inspire some students to participate in iGEM in future.
Scroll down to check out our slides and textbook chapter!
Edinburgh iGEM 2023: CynRefine
Another collaboration we made was once again with the Edinburgh iGEM Team, in a project known as CynRefine. The goal of this project is to build a search engine that allows the user to easily look for iGEM parts, undoubtedly a useful tool for future iGEMers. With a “Tag, Search, Enhance” search structure, users are able to sieve through the database by selecting various tags and searching for keywords, which is further enhanced by natural language processing. Tags, for instance, include “Promoter” and “Terminator” for different parts, and “E. coli” and “Bacteriophage” for different chassis.
In particular, a few of our dry lab members were heavily involved in this project, contributing a sorting algorithm that is able to organise input items by relevance. For more information on CynRefine, visit the GitHub at https://github.com/Gabriel-EspinozaDiaz/CynRefine.
Unfortunately, CynRefine has been dropped as of writing, however, talks have been made to continue the project after the Jamboree.
Biomakespace : An Introduction to Synthetic Biology Workshop
Biomakespace is a community lab in Cambridge, UK, where engineering meets biology. They aim to spark an interest in synthetic biology and provide a learning space for this exciting field. In line with this goal, we held a workshop during the September Biomaker Meetup, where we introduced synthetic biology and presented our iGEM project to the attendees, most of whom are engineers with little experience in biology. This was followed by a microscope viewing of some biofilm slides.
