In order to engage with the iGEM community, our team collaborated with the BostonU team to organize and host the Northeastern iGEM Meetup (NEGEM) on July 6, 2018. The BostonU, BostonU Hardware, Harvard, MIT, and UConn teams gathered at NEGEM to present their current projects and progress, as well as share and receive advice among teams. We provided feedback forms for all teams per presentation in order make it easier for comments and questions to be recorded and used to improve the presentations and projects.
Our team gave a twenty minute presentation introducing the applications of microfluidics in synthetic biology and our project, TERRA, to our fellow iGEM teams, most of whom had not been exposed to the field of microfluidics prior. We explained the general workflow of manufacturing and testing microfluidic devices, as well as discussed the impact of our project to the microfluidic industry and greater scientific community. We then received feedback on our presentation and answered questions regarding the function and applicability of TERRA. The general consensus was that our presentation on microfluidics as a field was clear, but there were questions of how sterile microfluidic chips were and the cost of our system. We incorporated this feedback to our project by creating a sterilization protocol and a cost analysis of our system.
Overall, NEGEM provided an opportunity for iGEM teams to discuss collaborations and obtain valuable feedback and advice from fellow teams and team mentors to further projects.
