Team:iTesla-SoundBio/Collaborations
iTesla-SoundBio & Baltimore BioCrew
iGEM Guide for Community Laboratories
This year, we collaborated with the Baltimore BioCrew, another high school iGEM team, to create an iGEM Guide for Community Laboratories that are interesting in starting a high school iGEM team. With the unique circumstances of being a high school team and working out of a community lab, we have had to surpass different challenges and situations that many teams may not have come across. We were also aware that many community labs around the world were interested in participating in iGEM, but were having difficulties to do so -- so by designing a guide, we hope to help these labs with some of the issues that they are facing, as they are ones that we have faced. To begin, and before we created our guide, we contacted community laboratories in many different countries to see what issues they had faced in trying to participate in iGEM. We reached out to around 29 community labs around the world, the email reading as follows:
- Have you ever considered having an iGEM team? If so, what were the perceived barriers? (i.e. fundraising, finding students or mentors, etc)
- Would a report detailing our experiences in creating and maintaining an iGEM team be useful to you?
We were ecstatic to hear back from 11 community labs from around the world (BosLab, BioCurious, Bricobio, ReaGent, Ronin Genetics, The Open Science Network, DIY Bio Hong Kong, Victoria Makerspace, AbroBios, BioBlaze, and Bioscope). Many of them expressed struggles with:
- “Recruiting and finding high commitment amongst members”
- “Not knowing how [to] fundraise or raise money for a team”
- “Organizing a team”
- “Biology background knowledge”
With their replies, we structured our guide to consist of 6 sections to best address some of the concerns that we had heard. These sections are:
1. Recruiting 2. Communication & Tools 3. Leadership 4. Timeline/Scheduling 5. Protocols & Lab Notebooks 6. Fundraising
In each section, we outlined some of our recommendations for new teams, some background from our teams’ experiences, and other alternative ideas and solutions that we had brainstormed. As our experience with iGEM continues, we plan on adding more sections and we are striving to encourage more community laboratories to invite local high schoolers to compete in iGEM. For a live, and more updated version of our guide, check out this Google Doc.
iTesla-SoundBio, Tacoma RAINMakers, & Team Washington
Pacific Northwest iGEM Meetup hosted by the Washington iGEM team
On August 18th and 19th iGEM teams from around Washington (Tacoma RAINMakers, Team Washington & iTesla-SoundBio) met up to share ideas, give feedback, and bond over our shared love for synthetic biology. This event gave us great opportunities to prepare for the jamboree and hear from people working in the biotech industry and academia. We had the opportunity to meet with iGEM ambassadors, Holly Bowman and Amy Chen, about our project. Holly was a part of the 2017 Georgia State Team, whose project we decided to base our work off of. She described the setbacks her team had faced and gave us suggestions to improve our progress. The advice of the ambassadors gave us meaningful insight on the future steps we should take for wetlab, human practices, and beyond. After a mock jamboree poster session, practice presentations, and talks from our keynote speakers, we headed to Gasworks Park for an outreach event. There we got Seattle families involved in synthetic biology activities and talked about our iGEM project. All in all, the PNW iGEM Meetup was an awesome opportunity to prepare for the Giant Jamboree and gain a thorough understanding of the projects of other iGEM teams, as well as the work currently being done in the field of synthetic biology.
Mentorship with Team Washington
This year we received help from the Washington iGEM team in terms of training and selecting presenters, human practices, basic wetlab procedure, and InterLab support. In terms of selecting presenters, Washington iGEM's Angel Wong and Andrew Hu critiqued each iTesla-SoundBio audition by giving feedback. Multiple members helped introduce new members to Benchling.com, pipette technique, and transformation procedure as well. They also kindly let us use their plate readers for the InterLab readings.
