Click here to watch Dr. Roy explain how physicians carefully tailor treatment plans for cachectic patients.
Click here to watch Dr. Zimmers discuss advocacy and the social and ethical aspects of cachexia research.
In July, the iGEM team at Nazarbayev University was kind enough to reach out to us seeking collaboration for their wonderful Summer Camp. NU organized a hybrid camp in three languages with the goal of educating local grade school students on the applications of synthetic biology, especially in the oncology realm, in order to inspire young, aspiring scientists to pursue their goals! They provided us with an opportunity to record a lecture for their attendees in which we explained the background and importance of cancer cachexia, along with how our therapy uses synthetic biology to tackle the condition. You can view our lecture here.
One of our team's favorite aspects of our iGEM experience was the balance we struck between difficult science with colleagues and creative fun with friends. While we practiced the utmost caution in our wet lab experiments and gave a concerted effort in our daily planning and design sessions, we also kept our research environment lighthearted and discovered that doing science is unbelievably fun! We documented many of these educational yet exhilarating moments in our YouTube vlogs. We sincerely hope others can feel our genuine joy in scientific research and take away a desire to do science as well!
In this vlog, we attend a talk on "building moonshots", introduce the team, and learn to put on PPE and use aseptic technique.
In this vlog, we witness the wonders of bacterial biocement, expose our daily routine of meetings and lab work, unbox the distribution kit, and passage mammalian cells.
In this vlog, we enjoy a lighthearted morning in the tissue culture room, attend a talk on cancer vaccines, and showcase our campus and workspace.
Coming soon to our YouTube channel, we will be uploading a podcast episode starring our team and advice we have for students interested in research along with our post-iGEM plans!
Between movies, popular media, and even school classes, wet lab science often appears like a mystical black box of abstract techniques that inexplicably yield real data and results. After a few weeks in the lab, our initially confused and inexperienced team realized that it's really a lot more hands-on and feasible than we had expected! To make science more accessible to other aspiring scientists, we released videos breaking down exactly how certain experimental protocols are done.
Allison walks us through the passaging protocol in this tutorial.
Katie and Allison demonstrate how to extract plasmid DNA from bacteria via miniprep in this tutorial.