In addition to expanding our community, our team works on strengthening past partnership and investing in the sustainability of our programs. These initiatives range from our iGEM wide outreach database and partnering with local high schools to new club partnerships and our internship program.

Maintaining positive relationships requires continued communication. One of our major goals this year was to create partnerships which spanned more than just a single event. A key component of this is our partnership with local high schools. High school students are future researchers and iGEM team members; we want to do all we can to inspire a passion for synthetic biology. High school teachers are tasked with teaching a diverse array of subjects, and we need to make synthetic biology an exciting part of their curriculum to teach so that their students are eager to learn. In order to support teachers in providing positive lab experiences for their students, and in the hopes of inspiring and interest in STEM, we have partnered with John Leone, a high school biology teacher with Williamsburg-James City County Schools. We worked closely with Mr. Leone to create outreach programs which aligned with the lessons being taught in class and ensured the level of sophistication was appropriate given his student’s backgrounds. We integrated synthetic biology lessons into the topics Mr. Leone was already teaching his class and arranged for a series of lab visits.

he lab visits were scheduled based on the lessons being taught in Mr. Leone’s class and they fell outside of the traditional iGEM schedule. The first event was held April 24th and was a collaborative effort between the iGEM 2017 team and this years team. This gave our teams an excellent opportunity to get together while promoting synthetic biology to high school students. 30 students attended the event. At the event, we taught the concepts of a restriction digest with an activity and practiced micropipetting before performing a real restriction digest. Students then completed a gel electrophoresis activity using their own DNA samples from the previous experiment. After lunch students jumped into bacteriophage activities, completing a soil enrichment and a direct plating. Students had brought their own samples and were on the hunt for novel bacteriophage; after the event, it was determined that 15 students successfully found phage! Students ended the day by analyzing their gel. The event was picked up by William & Mary News, check out the video Below.

We are working to expand this event each semester. This fall Mr. Leone is bringing three classes of 30+ students to our lab for a similar event. They will be visiting November 13th,14th and 15th.

Here are the awesome activities we have planned for this year's partnership. A huge thank you to iGEM alumnae Alyssa Luz-Ricca for all of her help in developing these class protocols!