Team:Bielefeld-CeBiTec/StudentsAcademy
Students Academy
We introduced students to synthetic biology.
At the end of June the Center for Biotechnology hosted the 4th students academy for “Synthetische Biologie/Biotechnologie“(synthetic biology and biotechnology). We welcomed 20 motivated students from all over Ostwestfalen-Lippe (OWL) who applied for a week of learning about modern biological methods and Bielefeld University in their summer holidays. The chosen students show extraordinary potential in natural sciences and great interest in learning about sciences.
Topics of this year’s academy were:
- Taxonomic identification
- Proteomics
- Bioinformatics
- Synthetic Biology
The synthetic biology experiment was hosted by us, because we wanted to share our experiences concerning biology and our love for sciences and practical lab work. We started by giving an introduction to iGEM, synthetic biology and our project. In the experiments we showed BioBricks their benefits in terms of easy handling and compatibility on the example of GFP and RFP Therefore we gave an insight in the concept of providing information and BioBricks through iGEM . The students isolated plasmid DNA, subsequently transformed BioBricks with different selection markers via heat shock and electroporation. Afterwards, backbones were identified by fluorescence and antibiotic resistance.
While doing experiments and at the barbecue with us and former iGEM team members, we talked about synthetic biology, iGEM in general, this year´s project in more detail and our motivation for choosing natural science for field of study as well as taking part in the iGEM competition.
All in all, we had a lot of fun. We hope the students enjoyed their time at CeBiTec. It would be great to meet some of them as new students in the following years. In summary, the student academy is a great tradition of Bielefeld-CeBiTec iGEM teams.
