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 started by visiting a local high school, James Madison Memorial. Over the length of a school day, we talked to all of the AP biology classes about synthetic biology as well as bio-ethics.

We spurred many interesting discussions, as well as brainstormed ideas that some synthetic biologists could try to pursue in the future. After this presentation, we also informed the classes that iGEM just recently opened a high school division, and if any of the juniors were interested in joining a team they should contact us. We made a standardized PowerPoint to give to any high school class, and that should be available to any iGEM team and can be found on our wiki.

Shortly afterwards, we received an email from their captain saying that they had a group of approximately ten students who would be definitely interested in forming a team their following year. Throughout the summer, we emailed them back and forth, suggesting possible ways to kick off their team. Near the middle of the summer, we had 8 of them come into our lab and demonstrated some simple synthetic biology techniques. During this time, we also gave them a crash course on BioBrick cloning, and the timeline that goes along with it.

In addition we also introduced them to the parts registry, and emphasized its helpfulness in both learning about what specific parts do and what teams have done in the past.

As their school year started, one of our members facilitated a brainstorming session to help them start thinking about projects that would be both educational and feasible in their timeline. Recently, we have helped them find an advisor to help them figure out the logistics of starting a competitive team for this upcoming year. We continually try to check up on them and ensure that they are brainstorming, and think about their project, and will hopefully be able to advise them in the spring once they start experimenting. In addition, here is a public link to our powerpoint that any team can use if they desired to go and talk to a local high school: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27094227/HS%20presentation.pptx