Southern California iGEM 2015 Meetup

On August 6, our team met with two iGEM teams - La Verne and UCLA - at the first Southern California iGEM meetup held at UCLA. Our entire team attended along with two of our advisors, Phillip and Bart. We discussed our projects and our attempts to make iGEM a sustainable program at our respective universities because we are all relatively new teams. We concluded that fundraising and garnering support from our academic departments were a few obstacles with a significant impact on team establishment. 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 seven members of the the Torrey Pines and Canyon Crest San Diego high school iGEM team on September 4. The team shared with us their project goals and their progress. We also 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 on-campus laboratories and local biotechnology 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 it 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.