Team:IIT-Madras/Human Practices
Overview
The rationale behind choosing ADaPtat1ion as our project for this year and working on the ‘Foundational advance’ track is aimed at improving the tools available to the synthetic biology community for working on an unconventional host- A. baylyi. We expanded this idea and added the data for our own host to the database ChassiDex in hope of enabling any researcher to work with synthetic hosts without any barriers. With a similar idea, we worked on spreading the fundamentals of synthetic biology across in different indian languages and many international languages through the Language Project. We expanded our efforts to spread synthetic biology through our outreach efforts, language project publicity, science communication initiatives and collaborations. The following are links to the various initiatives and activities undertaken as a part of Silver and Gold Human practices respectively:
Silver human practices
As a part of satisfying the silver human practices, we have undertaken a wide variety of initiatives ranging from educational initiatives of the Language project to school visits and sessions of the Biotech Research Club. As a part of engagement, we talked to a large number of people belonging to different regions of the country that speak different languages. Through the videos of the language project, we were able to educate them about the basics of Synthetic biology. Further, we have also listed out our collaborative efforts with many iGEM teams and people to help in publicising our activities. Read more about silver human practices (https://2018.igem.org/Team:IIT-Madras/Silver)
Gold human practices
Our motivation behind choosing an unconventional host like A. baylyi was to enable it to perform specialized actions such as degradation of aromatic compounds. However, due to lack of a synthetic toolkit and codon table, we decided to focus our efforts on generating this. Further, we decided to add all the resources we used for our experiments in the form of an online resource called ‘Baylyi News’. Read more about gold human practices