Team:UConn/HumanPractices
Human Practices
Community Outreach
Community outreach is an integral part of the iGEM experience; our community outreach efforts allow us to both gain new perspectives on our work as well as challenging us to put our work and the goals of iGEM into context for members of our community. UConn iGEM strives every successive year to further our community connections and make meaningful, long-term relationships with members of our community. This project cycle, we focused largely on education, running several demonstrations for individuals of all ages as well as leading discussions about relevant topics. On Saturday, February 24, 2018 we lead an interaction demonstration at our local Middle School Science Bowl in which participants were able to visualize DNA via a simple extraction procedure from strawberries. Included in this presentation was a broad overview of genetic engineering, molecular biology, where we can see genetics and GMOs in everyday life, and potential career paths within genetic engineering. We’re planning a similar activity, albeit with a slightly larger age range if about 14-18 versus the range of about 12-14 during the Science Bowl. This activity will be taking place with the support of UConn 4-H Adventures in STEM on November 3, 2018. Additionally, we led a genetic engineering trivia night for the Science Club at E.O Smith High School on May 31, 2018. This team participates in the Science Bowl and the Science Olympiad competition. Our contact, Dr. Cheryl Granger, is the supervisor for this club and was extremely helpful in guiding the focus of our questions; we wanted to design the trivia to complement their current curriculum swell as mirror the format of the AP Biology Exam multiple choice section. This event also included the primer design activity from the activity book created in 2015 by the William and Mary iGEM team. Students were split into small groups of about 4-6 individuals and and challenged to consider length, annealing temperatures, and interactions with the DNA strands as we floated through the room as consults. We briefly presented on who we are and what we do at UConn as well as gave them an idea of the scale and the content of our projects. The students were especially excited to discuss the microbial fuel cells and their possibilities in the industrial sector. This lead into further discussion about the interdisciplinary nature of genetic engineering; in addition to the manufacturing sector we briefly discussed what other fields related to engineering and what jobs are available that relate to genetic engineering. The discussion with these students, and their unique questions, inspired us to apply an dplane a CICATS Science Cafe. Schedule for November 16, 2018 this event is designed to open a dialogue with 30 minutes presentation by Mark Mimee of the MIT Department of Biological Engineering. This keynote presentation is to be followed by Q&A session where we hope to see similar discussion as with Dr. Granger’s students at E.O Smith. The audience of the event is members of the surrounding community, from high-school students to working professionals in any field. We will be advertising the event to persons of all backgrounds, encouraging both faculty and students to attend.
Collaborations
MIT
This summer, we were mentored by the MIT iGEM team in making and using electrocompetent cells, making chemically competent cells, Golden Gate Assembly, and organization of the team. As a longstanding, experienced team, MIT has more experience in designing experiments and getting their projects from start to finish. Initially, we were struggling to get competent cells that would take up our parts. After speaking with MIT at the NEGEM meetup, they shared a useful protocol that, once used, yielded extremely competent cells that we used for the entirety of our project. In August, we were invited back to MIT, where we learned about chemically competent cells, Golden Gate Assembly, and general running of the team. We used the protocol and advice on chemically competent cells for our lambda red recombineering procedure, in which we had to transform cells multiple times with different plasmids to knockout two genes. This proved extremely important in our project as, without the knockouts, our MtrCAB system would have competed with other naturally-occurring pathways in the E. coli, decreasing its efficiency and effectiveness in the project. Additionally, MIT explained their work using the Universal Acceptor vector backbone with specifically-designed insert segments for easy assembly using Golden Gate. Although it was too late to use this for this year’s project as our parts were already ordered and partially assembled, we will be able to use this information, along with the toolkit they are designing this year, for future projects.
University of Toronto
We were also mentored by the UToronto team, which provided advice on how to begin with a modeling effort for our team. Brayden and Fin gave direction on what items to start with. The first suggestion was a confirmation that our plan to study the kinetics of each of the enzymes was a reasonable place to start. This study would require both an estimation and/or literature search for each of the k values for each of the enzymes involved. Next, we discussed whether the loading/diffusion of phenazine shuttles was a limiting factor for the transfer of electrons between electrode and our engineered system. This aspect of our system could potentially be modeled using a random walk model of the electrons being transferred. Both these items could be used for our future work in modeling the MES system.