Team:Wisconsin-Madison/hpractice

• Team

  • Team Members
  • Advisors
  • Sponsors

• Projects

  • Engineering Limonene Production in E.coli
  • Translational Coupling Cassette (TCC)

• Parts

  • Translational Coupling Cassette
  • Negative TCC Control
  • Positive TCC Control
  • Codon-optomized LIMS1

• Modeling

• Protocol

• Safety

• Human practice

Outreach: James Madison Memorial High School

This year our iGEM team decided to combine the Human Practice requirement with helping another iGEM team. In order to do this, we began by visiting a local high school, James Madison Memorial. Over the length of a school day, we talked to all of the Advanced Placement biology classes about synthetic biology, iGEM and bioethics.

We spurred many interesting discussions, and brainstormed feasible project ideas that these aspiring synthetic biologists could pursue in the future. After our presentation, we also informed the classes that iGEM recently opened a high school competition division, and instructed any interested freshman, sophomores or juniors to contact us for guidance if they were interested in starting a team. To help other iGEM teams, we also created a standardized PowerPoint for any iGEM team to use at their own local high schools to introduce synthetic biology and iGEM. This powerpoint is available on our wiki here.

It turned out that many of the students we spoke to were in fact interested in starting a team. We received an email from their captain explaining they had a group of approximately ten students who would be definitely interested in forming a team for next years competition. After corresponding throughout the summer, brainstorming various feasible project ideas, we invited eight of the students to our iGEM lab to demonstrate some simple synthetic biology techniques, including BioBrick cloning, and to give them a more realistic view of what a day in the life of an iGEM team is all about.

We also introduced them to the parts registry, emphasizing its helpfulness in both learning about the purpose of individual parts as well as what other teams have done with them in the past.

As their school year started, one of our team members facilitated a brainstorming session to help them start thinking about projects that would be both educational and feasible in their timeline. We continue to follow up with the progress of the team's project brainstorming, and have been a source of guidance for their planning. As most of our members will still be attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring semester, we will continue to be available for advising when they are ready to begin experimenting. Furthermore, this is a project we plan to carry on with UW-Madison's future iGEM teams, hopefully expanding to other high school's in Wisconsin.