<p>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.</p>
<p>Shuffle Festival was a week long festival held in Mile End. The week-long festivities involve film, science, storytelling, performance art, architectural installations, walks, food, comedy and music. Members from London Biohackspace had an opportunity to run a stall on July 26th at the Migration Pavilion. We ran a “Beer Simulation Workshop” where we provided visitors with Vanilla, Lemon and Miraculin flavour.</p>
<p>The London Biohackers are working with Jack Heal to communicate the ideas and development of our 2015 iGEM project at the first ever comedy lecture on synthetic biology. Sponsored by the Royal Society of chemistry, the show aims to answer the most pressing question in synthetic biology like: What is a spider goat? Can we create artificial life? And why haven’t we made a real Jurassic Park yet… along with discussing the potentials of biobricks and genetic engineering. Also all the attendees of the lecture received information about iGEM and the London BioHackers stickers to take away with them. Shows were presented everyday from the 8/8/2015 to the 29/8/2015 with each week the London Biohackers iGEM presentation evolving as the project evolved. We will have more feedback through in the coming weeks.</p>
The London Biohackspace is a UK open biolab, run entirely by its volunteer members, based at the London Hackspace. We are the first community lab in the UK approved for carrying out genetic techniques and we are the only community lab taking part in iGEM from Europe. Our lab is grounded on open-source principles and community development, which allows the freedom for anyone to pursue collaborative or individual projects. The strength of the biohacking and DIYbio community is the diversity of its members. London Biohackspace hopes to encourage enthusiastic amateurs and professionals with backgrounds in a broad mix of professions such as artists, engineers, biologists and programmers to carry out innovative bioscience projects. Anybody can join us and become a Biohacker!
Growing the DIYBio and SynBio Community with fun products
DIY Brew Kit's Purpose & Design
Our project aims to develop an all-in-one toolbox for creating designer brewing yeast strains that can be modified to produce beers with novel flavours, scents, colours, nutrients and bioluminescence. We will also hope to enhance the use of yeast as a suitable chassis for community labs involved in synthetic biology. This will be achieved by developing new genetic parts which when combined will function as a platform to allow multiple genes to be integrated into chromosomal DNA of existing brewing strains. Additional parts will be created that allow designers to regulate the level of expression of inserted proteins thus giving users the ability to create novel brewing strains. The project will also explore how effective such organisms are in producing genuinely novel drink products that can challenge what beer can be, the project will produce an example product for the future of home brewing: a variety pack / kit for home brewers to experiment with different varieties of engineered yeast in their home brewing endeavours.
