Template:NYMU-2015notebook-calendar

• HOME
• OVERVIEW
  • Background
  • Collaboration
  • Achievement
  • Parts
  • Attributions
• PROJECT
  • Experiment
  • Modeling
  • Functional
    Prototype
• POLICY PRACTICES
• BIOSAFETY
• NOTEBOOK
  • Calendar
  • Lab
  • Protocol
• TEAM

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• 
  • Background
  • Collaboration
  • Achievement
  • Parts
  • Attributions
• 
  • Experiment
  • Modeling
  • Functional
    Prototype
• 
• 
• 
  • Calendar
  • Lab
  • Protocol
• 

Calendar

Year 2014

September

This was when we, the 2015 NYMU-Taipei iGEM team, were first recruited and got to know iGEM. We were first introduced to the concept of biobricking. Learning through the guidance of 2014 members, we worked together and made a video clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuAOV_EZ76A) to help promote their project, Human Oral Protection for Everyone, or HOPE in abbreviation.

October

We started meeting routinely on Monday nights to take lessons on synthetic biology and also to propose crazy ideas. Our instructors and teaching assistants (or TAs for short, 2014 iGEM team members) encouraged us to race our imagination to think of what we could possibly do with synthetic biology. Apart from that, we also got to listen to the 2014 iGEM team present and learned the basic framework of an iGEM project.

November

The NYMU-Taipei iGEM alumni joined the meeting to give us lectures on how to do literature research and how we edit Media wiki pages. Moreover, lessons on biobricking and circuit design were also given. We gradually started to have a more profound concept on iGEM projects and were even more inspired to assemble parts together to make new biological systems.

December

One of our advisers started teaching us modeling and guided us to solve problems via dry lab work, which largely involved programming; lectures were taken together with the 2015 HSNU iGEM team. We also started meeting twice a week to come up with project proposals and to present former iGEM projects from various tracks to our fellow team members. By the end of the year, each of us had proposed at least one idea and had started doing research on related topics.

Year 2015

January

During winter vacation, the 2014 iGEM members returned as TAs for the lab training session. We were first given the safety training by our instructor, Dr. Ching-Fen Chang and gained hands-on experiences on running cloning cycles to create chimeric DNA. Our TAs also refreshed us on literature research, primer design, and viewing plasmid sequences and maps. After we first proposed our project blueprints in December, we were then divided into two groups to discuss and conduct literature research.

February

We gathered together to compile the information we collected over the winter and made presentations on “Eradication of Malaria” and “Construction of Heat Box”, which were the two topics we chose before the end of last semester. Additionally, we had a newly introduced proposal, “Eco-fitness”, which aimed to deal with obesity. During meetings we had fervent debates over different approaches and the feasibility of each idea. This was when we began intensive research, further elaborated on project proposals, and started actively planning out experimental design.

March

We continued brainstorming and came up with various novel ideas, and our present project was first proposed during one meeting in March. The initial idea was rather simple, and then we managed to solve the problem of potato late blight from various aspects as we got to know the life cycle of Phytophthora infestans and the pathogenesis of the disease.

April

We settled on the topic “Fight the Blight”, and roughly divided our team into three different sub-groups aiming to come up with strategies against this epidemic via competitive inhibition, chemical signal detection, and permeabilization of cell membrane or cell wall degradation. We tried to further expand our knowledge in different fields of study: organic chemistry, phytopathology, and the biology of oomycetes, for instance.

May

As we continued to conduct literature research and came up with more detailed experimental layout, in May we had a second lab training session for wet-lab-members-to-be, and we also started grouping up into different divisions. We had also started to reach out to other iGEM teams for collaboration and exchange of ideas. Our human practice group also interviewed research institutes to learn more about the issue.

June

This was when we actually started constructing circuits and began working in the labs. Our modeling leader had also started working on simulations and building models for different sections of experiments. Team wiki was under early construction. As far as we were concerned, June was a fresh new page where our voyage really began :)

July

Everything sped up as we started summer vacation and thus had more time to work in lab. We never stopped public outreach, and were extremely glad to invite the CGU iGEM team to meet and share their ideas with us. The major event in July would no doubt be the NCTU Asian iGEM team meetup, where teams from different regions join together and new opinions emerged. Besides, Professor David Westenberg from University of Missouri came by to visit us, heard us present, and gave rather constructive suggestions. Various changes on previous experimental design were made, yet we somehow managed to hang in there to go through the challenges together :)

August

We held a summer camp for the Taipei American School (TAS) students, majorly the 2016 iGEM team members, to introduce to them iGEM and lab work. Other than that, we went to the TAS club fair to promote synthetic biology and to invite more people to join in iGEM to learn more about it. We not only focus on high school students, but also wanted to share the idea of biobricking with elementary school students. One of our team members drew a color book and used illustrations to depict our project overview as well as the idea of assembling different biological parts together.