Monday 15th June 2015

The UCL iGEM boot camp is a week long event designed to provide iGEM participants with a crash course in the skills necessary to compete in the iGEM competition. This years boot camp was attended by team members from University College London's own 2015 undergraduate team along with team members from Birkbeck University and the community-run London Biohackspace laboratory. The camp primarily consisted of a number of technical workshops designed to help iGEM newcomers (and a few grizzled veterans) develop essential iGEM lab skills such as biobrick design and construction along with bacterial culturing and transformation techniques. Further workshops were also available on topics such as how computational modelling can lead to iGEM success, constructing your own spectrophotometer and how to build an award winning wiki (without having to stay up all night on wiki-freeze deadline day). Previous iGEM participants were on hand throughout the week to provide assistance as well as offer invaluable advice on how this years teams can excel in the iGEM competition (step 1:rob a bank). The week concluded with a mini-jamboree in which each team presented their chosen project and current progress to the rest of the group in a format similar to the iGEM giant jamboree held in Boston at the end of the competition.