Notebook

Aims For This Week

In the upcoming week we will be learning the skills to implement the many ideas we have generated over the last few months. This includes a tight schedule of exciting talks by advisors from various fields, to inform us about various topics relating to our project, and lab-training in the UCL’s Advanced Centre for Biochemical Engineering (ACBE). We hope that by the end of the week we will gain the skills to begin our lab-work, and will have some guidance from our advisors as to how best to proceed. In particular, we look forward to meeting Paola Gomez-Pereira – a specialist in marine microbiology from the National Oceanographic Centre at Southampton University.

Monday

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. This project design and competition format is an exceptionally motivating and effective teaching method (from the iGEM website)