Team:Madrid-OLM/Public Engagement

• Team
  • Members
  • Attribution
  • Sponsors
• Project
  • Description
  • Contribution
  • Improve
  • Demonstrate
  • Judging Form
• Aptamers
  • Overview
  • Discovery
  • Characterization
  • Computational
    Improvement
  • Binding to Electrode
• Device
  • Overview
  • First Prototype
  • Final Prototype
    • Overview
    • Microfluidics
    • Electronics
• Experiments
  • Interlab
  • Protocols
    • Aptamer Related
    • Manufacturing
• Human Practices
  • Integrated Human Practice
  • Education and
    Engagements
  • Collaborations
• Awards
  • Hardware
  • Applied Design
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Measurement
• Medals

Education and Engagement

In Madrid, especially inside the university the curiosity to investigated and push oneself to learn out of “your comfort zone” has been settling in during the last years. We started to see this problem when, even though Spain is underrepresented in compared to other European countries, the teams that are established, have years of experience participating and the people around them know beforehand what iGEM is and what represent.

However, in Madrid, there has not been any teams, and only a few people have heard about the competition. Knowing that this a global competition where more than 300 teams from all over the world compete, proves that it was never hiding or hard to access, and yet nobody seems to have heard about it. We not only tried to promote iGEM, but all the small initiatives that could arise, and let the students know that with a little effort everything can be accomplished.

We tried to solve this issue by encouraging students and mainly teachers because they are that can continue promoting in classes and e-mails when we are gone.

1. The lectures about synthetic biology during the meetup we hosted: even though the meetup was only for iGEM participant, we invited anyone the wanted to attend the lectures, to learn what synthetic biology is about and the endless possibilities it has to offer.

Synthetic biology lectures



2. Presentation on the faculty of biology: hosted by the faculty itself, we explain in more detail about of project and our experience participating in the competition.

Our team has defended the idea of opening the design to everyone, regardless their economic capacity. As iGEM is getting bigger, incorporating teams from every part of the world, it is mandatory to design projects able to be implemented worldwide, in a simple and affordable way.

We have designed our product thinking about simple ways of manufacturing, as laser cutting and 3D printing. Due to this, reproducibility is almost ensured. We conceived a design for an universal user.

As the design is open to the whole community, another need that popped up was the modularity of our design. The design has been modular in the following aspects:

1. Microfluidic workbench: we have generated a workbench to provide the user with a versatile workbench for microfluidics experimentation. Any chip might be tested.

2. The hardware design enables the user to test any aptasensor, regardless its composition. We have incorporated room for a potentiostat.

3. The mobile app gathers data from many measuring stations. Therefore the app might be more organic, or complex once a number of stations are enabled to share data with the app.

We would love to be consider for the Applied Design and serve as a positive orientation for those teams who want to think in a global thinking about design, integrating responsibility when conceiving new horizons, when designing brand new ideas and when realising their dreams.