Team:BostonU/Collaborations

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Wellesley

NEGEM

Collaborations

Collaboration between iGEM teams is one of the most important aspect of the competition. Instead of competition where teams are struggling to out perform each other, teams are encouraged to work together for the betterment of synthetic biology as a whole. The Boston University team has taken this ideal to heart and has worked in several different ways to collaborate with other teams.

Wellesley

Through the NEGEM meetups we were able to interact with the iGEM team from Wellesley College and start a collaboration with them. We were so excited to go to Wellesley College and experience their iGEM project for a day.

The 2015 Wellesley iGEM team aimed to create a museum exhibit to teach visitors about synthetic biology and get them excited about potential applications. The team gave us an initial introduction to their project at NEGEM, explaining the premise that an explorer travelling to hostile environments (deep sea, Mars, etc.) could utilize synthetic biology to create products that would be necessary for them to live in these areas. The exhibit would be catered to engaging different age groups of children - as young as 8 and as old as 16. This project will ultimately be featured at The Tech Museum in San Jose, California when it is completed.

The Wellesley team invited our team to their campus and give them feedback on their initial prototype. When we arrived at their Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab, we were met with not only their prototype museum exhibit but also many other gadgets such as Google Glass and Oculus Rift.

The Wellesley team displayed their project on a multitaction screen, and allowed us to pretend to be explorers in their simulated harsh environments. We had to integrate bacteria with existing elements of the environment, such as soil, to help our bacteria create necessary products, such as food. It was a lot of fun!

We had the unique opportunity to give the Wellesley iGEM team feedback about their project, since we were an experimental team and they were largely a computational design team. We suggested that they include more pertinent information about synthetic biology, such as more about the science behind the key reactions occurring in bacteria, in order to engage some of their older age group visitors. They ended up using actual BioBrick parts from the iGEM registry as elements of their synthetic biology reactions. We also suggested that more detailed information about methodologies be included, such as using “how to screens” to better explain experimental protocols. This was inspired by our own experiences doing wet lab research - we learned how different procedures worked when they were laid out in step-by-step protocols.

We heard more about Wellesley’s final device at the second NEGEM meetup. Their platform is very exciting, and we look forward to seeing reactions of the iGEM community at the jamboree! Furthermore, we are very excited to have participated in troubleshooting an exhibit that will someday featured in a real museum.