Team:Imperial College

• PROJECT
  • DESCRIPTION
  • MECHANISMS
  • APPLICATIONS
  • ACHIEVEMENTS
  • BRAINSTORM
• DRY LAB
  • OVERVIEW
  • MODELLING
  • HARDWARE
• WET LAB
  • OVERVIEW
  • RESULTS
  • EXPERIMENTS
  • PROTOCOLS
  • PARTS
• HUMAN PRACTICES
  • OVERVIEW
  • INTEGRATED HP
  • COMMUNICATION
  • OUTREACH
  • COLLABORATIONS
• PEOPLE
  • TEAM
  • ATTRIBUTIONS
  • SPONSORS
• FOR JUDGES
• JOURNAL

Welcome to the Imperial iGEM 2018 Team Wiki!

We want to merge the advancing technologies of electronics and synthetic biology to work on creating patterns to facilitate the evolution of complex biological systems.

Computer science and electrical engineering are two of the most innovative fields of modern technology and are the early inspirations for the field of synthetic biology. They have provided the concepts of modularity and circuits, which we as synthetic biologists have adapted to the context of biology.

While brainstorming, it came to our attention that so far nearly all avenues of gene expression control have been explored, including chemicals, temperature and optogenetics. We at Imperial want to push the limits of synthetic biology by exploring other methods of genetic control, which is why we have taken the challenge to bridge the communications gap between electronics and biology by creating a system where we can control gene expression using differential electrical stimuli.

Not only that, but we wish to achieve this on a 2D lawn of bacteria and have localised control of gene expression, essentially designing patterns of our choice. Why patterns you may ask? Well, because patterns are essential for complexity, one only has to look at any living organism to understand how crucial patterning and communication is for the evolution of composite tissues, beautiful shapes and intelligent behaviours.

Our project is called PixCell, and we look forward to seeing you at the Giant Jamboree.

Potential Collaborations

Email us a official.imperial.igem@gmail.com

Parts Collaboration

Hey iGEMers, if anyone happens to be working on a project involving engineering fluorescent proteins, chromoproteins or transcription factors, do contact us to set up a potential collaboration!

Outreach Collaboration

We, the London university teams (Imperial, UCL, King’s and Westminster), are organising an outreach event aimed towards high school students, introducing them to synthetic biology and iGEM. We plan on having key note speakers, a panel style talk and a poster session of the current iGEM team’s projects. We would like to invite all iGEM teams, close and far, to come take part in our event by presenting their posters to teenagers and showing them the scope of synthetic biology. If you would like to present, please do email us so we can have an understanding of numbers and can manage space accordingly. We look forward to hearing from you!

Human practices Collaboration

We need your help developing a team communication! We have noticed that team work can at times be quite messy, which is why we have decided to try and solve this issue by developing tools that allow team members to communicate in a calm and orderly manner. But to develope these tools, we need to understand the broad range of problems that teams face, and we cannot do this without you. More details of the survey can be found on the link bellow.

Team Communication Survey

Along the same lines of communication, we have also designed a science communication guideline, as another issue that we see in our field is inconsistency when it comes to sharing information with non-scientists and the general public. To help scientist tackle this, we have designed this interactive guide, which is still in its early phase, but we would appreciate any feedback that you could give us on its usefulness and any ways that we could improve it. So please contact us if you would like a copy of the guide to critic for us, and we can put you down as collaborators.