Microbiology Society Annual Conference

A symposium titled "Mining Microbial Diversity for Pleasure and Profit" is being organized at the Microbiology Society Conference in Liverpool, UK from March 21-24, 2016. iGEM 2015 teams from UK and Ireland are invited to attend and show their work to a wide audience. The organizers propose on Wednesday March 23 to hold a dedicated iGEM poster session and to also provide two selected iGEM teams with speaking slots in the afternoon symposium.

The Microbiology Society has these special offers for iGEM team attendees:

• any undergraduate student who joins the society for 2016 can attend the conference for free
• undergraduate student members presenting a poster can apply for a grant to support their attendance (travel/accommodation); the Society may offer such grants to up to two members per team (on application)
• full costs covered for the two selected speakers (chosen from abstracts)

Team members who are postgraduates would need to be/become postgraduate members of the Microbiology Society to receive waived event registration and a travel grant from the Society under the normal procedures.

The official registration deadline for the conference is December 11, but iGEM team members have until Christmas to submit their materials.

Please contact Dr. John Morrissey, Chair Eukaryotic Division, Microbiology Society with any questions: j.morrissey (at) ucc.ie

Synbio survey

Hi iGEMers! I am a synthetic biologist at Johns Hopkins and am interested in understanding the background and scientific goals of the iGEM community. Are you a biology major leaning toward grad school, a music major looking for some scientific expression, or maybe out of school and participating in a community team? What are your hopes for synthetic biology, and what do you hope to accomplish yourself? Please consider filling out a very quick survey to tell me a little about yourself and your iGEM team. I'm hoping to share results with everyone soon, possibly at next year's Jamboree. The survey can be found here: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2334335/iGEM2015

Many thanks for your help!

Jessica Dymond

ZJU-China Letter about Shipping DNA from China

ZJU-China has kindly sent us a letter about shipping DNA from China, which collects the experiences of many teams. Their advice may be helpful to other teams in China.

You can always contact iGEM HQ to let us know about any shipping difficulties.

Tours at Ginkgo Bioworks

Ginkgo is opening up its foundry to iGEM teams during this year's Giant Jamboree. We will be offering tours 11-4pm Thursday, Sept 24 and 3-6pm Monday, Sept 28 and currently have 12 spots remaining. Click on the link to sign up your team for a half-hour slot and please note your team name and number of tour participants in the description box during sign up. Individuals can e-mail sboissel(at)ginkgbioworks.com directly and we will try to fit you in separately! We look forward to having you visit and learn more about our company!

Cloning Survey

Hey, iGEMers! We are the Stanford-Brown 2015 iGEM Team, and part of our project this year involves making transformations more efficient. We've crafted a survey to learn about your experiences with bacterial cloning this summer, and to see how we can help most. The survey can be found here:

Team UI_Indonesia invites you to fill out a questionnaire!

We are UI_Indonesia iGEM team. We are interested in finding out how the knowledge of and opinions about solving overpopulation problem through synthetic biology vary between continents, countries and even cities. To do this, we hope teams from across the world will want to work together to write a questionnaire which we can each distribute to the public and share responses.

In our own experience we have found that a number of questions keep arising. One question we have encountered throughout our project is “Is it ethical if a person (especially women) use an engineered bacteria as their contraceptives ?”. or even "How's family planning implementation in some countries ?, Will it affects our project ?" We imagine that your team has come across similar questions while working on your project and this is a great opportunity to survey and compare opinions from around the world.

Please take a few minutes to fill out our questionnaire below!

Team Tec_Guadalajara invites you to participate in their forum

Hello we are Graph-Gene iGEM team Tec_Guadalajara
We, the students at the Tec de Monterrey-Campus Guadalajara, are very interested in the international regulatory process of biotechnology and synthetic biology and want to get involved in the policy process that is shaping our discipline . We want to invite you to join us.

We developed two on-line forums, the first one is replicating the real discussion from parties and observers to the Convention of Biological Diversity (BCD, part of the United Nations) that took place recently, in preparation for next year's Conference and Meeting of the Parties of the Cartagena Protocol that will take place in Mexico, in a beautiful beach resort in Cancun, our Caribbean coast! Learn more about the COP-MOP of the CBD and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety of Biotechnology at https://www.cbd.int/convention/. if you have ever participated in Model UN activities, you know what we are talking about! We created a second forum regarding Intellectual Property issues. Our approach for this forum is to address the balance between sharing and protecting information about synbio development that may have commercial applications.

Your involvement is in two stages: First, learn about regulation of synthetic biology by joining our on-line forum and get involved in issues regarding policy development and Intellectual Property. We will advances of the results of this discussion in Boston in September 2015. Second: active participants of the forum will receive an invitation to join the international iGEM student team that could participate as an observer group at the UN conference in Mexico in 2016. You are welcome to join both on-line forums, regulatory and intellectual property, or choose just one of them depending on your interest as a team. Your active participation in our forums will show us your interest in regulatory and policy issues.

To access our on-line forums click on the link below and create an account that will identify you throughout the activity.
Link: http://synbioregulation.freeforums.net

A Suggestion for Collaboration between a Wet-lab Team and Korea U Seoul!

Hello fellow iGEM teams!

Team Korea U Seoul would like to ask you to co-develop projects by sharing some research information.

Our team have developed a web software ‘712’ to help synthetic biologist navigate metabolic data and design a biological circuit.

The program 712 provide researchers the optimal paths for given compound names of reactant and product. In addition, this software help scientists evaluate pathways through scores calculated from our own algorithm using KEGG database. You can easily understand that this web interface is a biological version of Google Maps.

If you want to collaborate with Korea U Seoul Team, please send us 1) simple explanation of your project, 2) the gene names of the circuit, and/or 3) any problem with the circuit design. We will do our best to address your obstacles. The reply will also contain the result data of software 712, which consists of the optimal paths, related information of each compounds and reaction, and the scores. Any feedback from your team would be welcomed, so please be free to contact us via KoreaUSeoul2015 (at )gmail (dot) com.

Best wishes,
Team Korea U Seoul

iGEM Rhizi

Bonjour iGEM teams!

We are the Paris Bettencourt Team and we would like to invite you all to our graphical database that we have set up to help iGEM teams know about fellow teams’ projects and to find collaborations easily.

The database is set on a base platform called Rhizi, and is called “the iGEM Rhizi”. It consists of nodes (techniques, keywords, organisms etc.) and any nodes common to two teams are automatically connected to form an interaction map. This helps in finding possible collaborations, and also in getting a general overview of what fellow teams are working on.

You can go to iGEM Rhizi and see for yourself, and enter your team’s features to make your team discoverable. Here is a short tutorial video that we’ve prepared to help initiate you into the database. If you have any question, you can contact us via email (igembettencourt2015 /AT/ gmail /DOT/ com) and Twitter (@iGEM_Paris). :)

We hope you make use of the database to find collaborations, and use the information for any further analysis and come up with amazing outcomes.

Team Paris Bettencourt

Mutation Survey and Statistics from Vanderbilt iGEM

Hello fellow iGEM teams!

Every geneticist knows that all DNA sequences carry the possibility for mutation. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the risks that these mutations pose to practically applying synthetic biology. Our team is looking for collaborators who are willing to answer a simple question: if your BioBricks were implemented in the real world, what would the consequences be if they ever mutated?

Could it turn your therapeutic into a poison? Could it frustrate production at a commercial scale? Could you lose a priceless genotype? Would it do anything at all? We want to challenge the community to think about these hard questions and critically examine the very real dangers posed by DNA mutation.

For those teams that complete a quick survey about what the consequences of mutation might be for their project, we have a special reward in mind: we will give you access to a computational algorithm that our team has developed to lower the mutagenic potential of gene sequences. Using this algorithm, we can give you statistics on how mutation-prone your favorite BioBricks really are.

Click on the button below to take our survey! If you are interested in receiving mutation statistics for your part, check the box on your survey and we'll get in touch with you.

iGEM Academy YouTube

Hey iGEM teams,

Greetings from Trinity College Dublin. We hope all your projects are going well. We would like to introduce you to iGEM Academy.

Past iGEM Teams have created some outstanding Youtube videos. We enjoy all aspects of iGEM on Youtube; the introductions, tutorials, and of course the music videos. However, we found that iGEM related videos can be difficult to navigate, with all teams having separate channels.

We have created iGEM Academy, a Youtube channel. It has the potential to be one of the largest collaborations in iGEM history, and we would like you to be a part of it.

The channel will contain several sections; Project Introductions, iGEM Tutorials, Lab Art, Musical iGEM, Outside the Lab, iGEM HQ.

• Project Introductions: a space for everyone to share project ideas, work, and goals
• iGEM Tutorials: contribute your knowledge and experience by explaining theory/demonstrating lab techniques
• Lab Art: a showcase of the colourful and creative world of synthetic biology
• Musical iGEM: a celebration of song and dance in the lab, be it an original or cover
• Outside the Lab: the innovations of synthetic biology outside of the competition
• iGEM HQ: videos about the iGEM competition and Jamboree

Meet & Greet workshop - hosted by Lambert GA

"Hello, College Advisors. Would you like to meet the High School students who are competing at the Jamboree? Would you like to encourage them to attend your university and join your team? Come to Lambert_GA's Meet and Greet at the Jamboree. We will have tables for you if you have any recruiting materials to share. Lambert High School iGEM (Lambert_GA) will have a small token as a thank you for your time. So that we can plan accordingly, please reach out via Twitter (@lamberths_iGEM) with your University name if this sounds like a workshop you are interested in attending."

Lambert GA

UCSF Wiki Flicks

iGEM Wiki Flicks: Make your own video abstract!

Now that the 2015 iGEM season is well underway, teams are busily documenting their work on their wiki pages. Although wikis are a great, detailed way to depict all aspects of a team’s project, it is not always the most easily accessible way to explain a synthetic biology project to a non-specialist audience. The UCSF iGEM team wants to challenge you to make a short, less-than-3-minute video to explain your project to share with the world! Your very own iGEM WikiFlick!

We encourage your team to be as creative as possible. This is a fantastic way to effectively convey your project not just to the iGEM community, but to the ANYONE (friends, family, students, colleagues, everyone!) in 3 short, easy minutes. You want your video to be informative, but also easily comprehensible for any viewer out there. Take this as an opportunity to explore new ways to communicate your awesome projects!

We want to share all the videos in a localized spot, so please check out guidelines for sending videos (and helpful tips for making them!) at our wiki or email us at SysSynBio(at)ucsf.edu

Flight iGEM from Team NEFU China

Hey, iGEM teams!

Are you suffering hard time dealing with numerous codes when building your team wiki? Too much work will be left to programmers if you still follow conventional procedures.

This year, we have created an amazing online platform, Flight iGEM, which will make significant changes to the workflow of wiki building! With Flight iGEM, every team member will be able to participate in the wiki creation. No matter where you are, you will be able to update contents of your wiki online.

Let’s say goodbye to the "code soup"!

For more details, please visit Flight iGEM.

LGBTQ+ Survey from Yale iGEM

Hello everyone! Yale iGEM is currently conducting a survey on experiences of LGBTQ+ scientists in the iGEM community. If you identify anywhere on the LGBTQ+ spectrum and have 5-10 minutes, we would greatly appreciate it if you took time to complete this anonymous survey. If you are an ally, and have opinions you want to share, feel free to click through the survey until you find the comments section, or email stephanie.mao@yale.edu (your identity will be kept private). Please take a moment and fill out our survey below!

BBC Radio 4 - FutureProofing, Episode 1 "Life"

FutureProofing is a new BBC series which examines the implications - social and cultural, economic and political - of the big ideas that are set to transform the way our society functions. In this episode, "Life", the programme examines the results of inventing and editing life forms, including how a new understanding of biology as a software engineering system that we can design has profound consequences for the way we think about Life in future.

Click to hear the online podcast!

ATOMS-Turkiye project video

Hi iGEMers!

We made an amazing video that describes our project: Fast&Cureous. We were very enjoyed during the preperation of it. We hope you enjoy, too.

You can also follow us on

• Twitter: http://twitter.com/Atoms_Turkiye
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AtomsTurkiye

Utah State outreach videos

Hello everyone! The 2015 Utah State University iGEM team is issuing an outreach challenge. We are inviting other iGEM teams to submit short videos that can explain what a gene is to middle school-aged students. We will compile the videos and show them to local middle school students who will rate the videos. Challenge winners will be selected based on those ratings. For those who are interested in participating, please view our video for more details and submit finished videos to utahstate.igem(at)gmail.com by 31 August 2015.

Thank you!

Utah_State iGEM Team

Colorado team meetup

Colorado iGEM teams welcome you to join us for a meetup event at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, CO.

Location:
Suzanne and Walter Scott Bioengineering Building, Colorado State University
Intersection of Loomis and Laurel Street
Fort Collins, CO 80521

Tentative Schedule:
10:45-10:00 am: Arrive at CSU
11:00 am-12:30 pm: Team presentations and feedback
12:30-1:30 pm: Lunch break
1:30-2:30 pm: Presentation on human practices topic (TBD)
2:30-5:00 pm: Fun activity (TBD)

Each team should plan to present their project background and current status for about 15-20 minutes. This will be followed by a questions and feedback portion to last 5-10 minutes.

If you would like to attend, please email us at csu.igem(at)gmail.com - we'd love to have you join us!

Team York collaboration call

Hi iGEM teams

We were wondering if you would be interested in collaborating. Would you be able to send us a 5ml sample of your drinking water and samples from any other local water sources. We are doing this to consider the amount of phosphate in the water on a global scale. In order to this would it possible to record the date of collection and filter the water using a microfilter of no more than 0.45um in size in order to remove any bacteria. We would really appreciate also if you could test the pH.

Our address is:

Dr James Chong
University of York
Biology Department
Wentworth way
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD
UK

Hope your project is going well and looking forward to meeting you in Boston.

Kind regards

Matthew Higgins
The York iGEM team

Tec-Monterrey's customs survey

Tec-Monterrey has created a survey to find out the state of customs for other countries!

• English
• Spanish

Washington University in St. Louis genetic engineering panel

Hey iGEM teams!

Here at Wash U we’re planning a panel on genetic engineering to be held in the fall for the Wash U community. We’re hoping to address some gray areas of synthetic biology and genetic engineering in agriculture, from safety and regulation to ethics and implications. We’re still finalizing our panelists, but hope to have experts from Monsanto and the Danforth Plant Science Center. We’re also in touch with some Wash U professors from the biology, philosophy, and anthropology departments.

We plan to start off the discussion with our own questions before opening it up to the audience. We’ve come up with a list of questions, but would love to get the input of some other iGEM teams. If you have questions you think would start interesting discussion at the panel, we’d love to hear them! Email us at washu.igem(at)gmail.com.

Best,

Wash U iGEM

UChile OpenBio crowdfunding

UChile OpenBio 's crowdfunding campaign is almost finished!
You can help them by visiting: https://fondeadora.mx/projects/proyecto-pla-creacion-de-un-plastico-biodegradable

Oxford troubleshooting offer

Another hello from the Oxford iGEM team,

We have a large wet lab team with a lot of experience cloning. If you're having trouble assembling biobricks, getting transformations to work, optimising PCR etc we'd like to help. This most likely applies to teams mainly focused on modelling but any UK team is welcome to get in touch.

Email us at oxfordigem(at)bioch.ox.ac.uk

Oxford questionnaire

Hello from the Oxford iGEM team!

We are interested in finding out how the knowledge of and opinions about medical applications of synthetic biology vary between continents, countries and even cities. To do this, we hope teams from across the world will want to work together to write a questionnaire which we can each distribute to the public and share responses.

In our own experience we have found that a number of questions keep arising. One question we have encountered throughout our project is “How would patients feel about the use of engineered organisms in a medical treatment?”. We imagine that your team has come across similar questions while working on your project and this is a great opportunity to survey and compare opinions from around the world.

Is this something you would be interested in working with us on?

Email us at oxfordigem(at)bioch.ox.ac.uk

iGEM Team PenPal by Team William and Mary

Greetings from William & Mary iGEM!

Do you have questions about your project that no one on your team can answer? Are you looking for a way to connect with other teams working on similar projects? Have you considered an iGEM Team PenPal?

Now that we are less than a week away from the deadline for teams to post their project descriptions on their team Wikis, we thought that teams with similar projects should have an easy way to get in touch with one another. Thus, the William & Mary iGEM team invites you to join our brand new iGEM PenPal program! All you have to do is fill out a quick form with a few sentences about your team, your project and your collaboration interests. Then we'll personally match you to another team working on a similar project or interested in a complimentary collaboration. Hopefully, our iGEM PenPal program can help facilitate collaboration between teams, improve the quality of the projects at the Jamboree, and foster some new friendships!

You can sign up for an iGEM PenPal below (a Google form), or fill out the PDF Application and email it to igem@wm.edu. The sooner you email us, the sooner you'll get your PenPal!

Synberc Dance-ology

Synthetic Dance-ology is an interactive performance activity that uses dance to engage public audiences about synthetic biology. In this Giant Jamboree workshop, a professional dancer and a scientist will teach iGEM teams how their iGEM projects and other research activities can be translated into movement to illustrate synthetic biology concepts and encourage dialog with diverse audiences. The workshop leaders will work with iGEM teams to break down their projects into parts that can be translated into dance movements. We will then illustrate how those parts and their movements are remixed and strung together to build a complete dance routine that translates an iGEM project. Through this method participants explore synthetic biology in a unique and fun way that reinforces learning, sparks questioning, and promotes interaction with each other in an informal setting.

Everyone is welcome to the workshop, but please email Shaila Kotadia at skotadia(at)berkeley(dot)edu if interested in having your project danced at the 2015 Jamboree! Learn more at dance.synberc.org.

German team meetup

Are you excited about your iGEM project and curious about the other German teams? Do you want to meet new people who are as enthusiastic about iGEM as you are? Do you need a break from all your exhausting lab work? Team Marburg looks forward to hosting all the German teams at their meetup from July 31 to August 2 at the Marburg an der Lahnaue campgrounds!

Contact Team Marburg at igemteam(at)synmikro.uni-marburg.de by June 25 if your team is joining so Marburg can make further arrangements! Additional information is available here: Meetup invitation.

iGEM Matchmaker by NTNU Trondheim

Hello iGEM teams!

Are you looking for another team to work with? Use the iGEM Matchmaker to find other teams interested in collaborating or helping you out with your project!

Thanks, Team NTNU Trondheim Follow us on Twitter: @NTNUigem Contact us on ntnu.igem (at) gmail.com

Team Seeker and BioBrick Seeker by Aalto Helsinki

Are you curious about past iGEM projects? Are you looking for inspiration? Or have a project in mind, but want to see what's been done before?

You can easily search through the team abstracts from 2008-2014 using the Team Seeker tool created by the 2014 Aalto Helsinki team and updated by the 2015 Aalto Helsinki team with the help of the 2015 Waterloo team.

Looking for a particular BioBrick in the current 2015 Distribution Kit?

You can easily find the sequencing status, plate location, part type, and plasmid backbone using the BioBrick Seeker tool that was created by the 2014 Aalto Helsinki team and updated by the 2015 Aalto Helsinki team.

Vote for Team UNA Honduras

You can help Team UNA Honduras to get more funding by voting for them!
Vote here!

What is iGEM video? by IONIS Paris

Team iGEM IONIS Paris made a video explaining what is iGEM!

Tec-Monterrey Meetup

Team iGEM Tec-Monterrey will be hosting a Mexican team meetup from April 30 to May 3 in Monterrey, Nuevo León. From Thursday to Sunday, teams will get to learn about each other’s projects, receive feedback from invited experts on the biotech field, and finally discuss the current state of synthetic biology in Latin-America and the many ways open for improvement.

ATOMS-Turkiye iGEM Team

Hello fellow iGEMers!

This year, we, ATOMS-Turkiye iGEM team, are going to attend the 6th International Medical Student Congress (IMSC) organized by our university Scientific Research Committee. The congress consists of presentations and discussions of various scientific and medical researches to feed the medical student attendants and both national and international students and academicians coming from all over the world with a scientific program that includes speeches from well known names carefully followed in the scientific world and a social program which will relax us throughout our time in Asya Thermal Hotel, located in Kizilcahamam, Ankara.

Last year, our previous team members and Paris Bettencourt 2013 team had performed a mutual workshop called "SynBio 4 All" explaining the basics of SynBio and iGEM competition to the young medical students and scientists.

This year, our team will also give a speech about synthetic biology, iGEM and last year's project. A synthetic biology and life in the lab workshop will also be performed.

We would like to invite all iGEMers and alumni to this scientific feast and hope to meet-up and discuss the issues of synthetic biology, attendance in iGEM and more with fellow iGEM teams.

You may visit congress web site: http://congress.tobat.org/ or watch this summary video of past congresses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krDYZlvSfhs&feature=youtu.be

Hope to see you there
ATOMS-Turkiye iGEM Team