Team:Carnegie Mellon/Practices
Community.
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 reading 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. In addition, we were able to work with Andre Samuel and learn about how he is bringing scientific research to a broader demographic within Pittsburgh