Team:Carnegie Mellon/Practices
Bringing synthetic biology to the people.
One of the major concerns we want to address with our project is that a number of schools and organizations lack access to tools that are crucial to conducting synthetic biology experiments. The main reason we chose to build a fluorimeter is that we felt there was no affordable way of effectively read common biological reporters. This severely limits the parts and circuits that underfunded teams can build and characterize, ultimately stunting the growth of iGEM and in turn synthetic biology. We were strongly influenced by the maker movement, which attempts to bring large manufacturing to the small scale.
As a part of our outreach, we were able to work with Dr. Andre Samuel of the Citizen Science Lab and learn how he is bringing scientific research to a broader demographic within Pittsburgh. We contributed to his efforts by donating sample of our luciferases so that he and his students could use it in their lessons and labwork. In addition, we presented our project to Allderdice High School's pre-Engineering classes in order to facilitate an understanding and interest in the possibilities of synthetic biology.
We also created instructional protocol cards detailing our protein purification protocol in a simple and concise way.
