Southern California iGEM 2015 Meetup
On August 6th, our team met with 2 iGEM teams -La Verne and UCLA- at the first Southern California iGEM meetup held at UCLA. Our whole team attended along with two of our advisors, Phillip and Bart. We discussed our projects and how to make iGEM a sustainable program at our respective universities because we were all relatively new teams. Fundraising and garnering support from our academic departments were significant. Also, we considered the possibility of starting a smaller synthetic biology conference in California. Overall, we had a great time meeting new people over pizza and cookies!
TP_CC San Diego iGEM Team Mentorship
We ended our week by meeting up with the Torrey Pines and Canyon Crest San Diego high school iGEM team on September 4th. The team shared with us the aim of their project and their progress. Also, we offered input about several applications that they mentioned. Both teams talked about our approach to Human Practices and we informed TP_CC San Diego about how we tackled funding and gained sponsorships from laboratories and biotech companies.
TP_CC San Diego presented issues they were facing: Since minimal research had been done on LbCHI31-chitinase before, they had difficulty mapping the effectiveness of the encoding gene against varied concentrations of purified chitin. A few of us helped troubleshoot. Due to the limited amount of time left, they wanted to run the trail in silico but did not have experience with modeling. Therefore, we gave insight on modeling and how the results should relate to laboratory work.
Before they left, one of our team members sent a guide on wiki editing to help expedite the designing process for TP_CC San Diego.
