Team:Wellesley TheTech/Outreach/Collaboration

COLLABORATION

 Our team collaborated with several other iGEM teams this past summer. In July, our team invited the BU and MIT iGEM teams to our lab where we performed user studies, received feedback on the prototype’s scientific accuracy, and listened to ideas on how to incorporate more of the scientific process into our exhibit. Users specifically suggested including informational and background videos, adding explicit instructions, and ways to distinguish their own engineered bacteria. In turn, we observed their iGEM presentations and commented on how each team could improve how they explain concepts in ways that someone with little background in synthetic biology could find interesting and understandable.

 We also communicated with the IONIS iGEM team and, with their permission, incorporated their video introducing synthetic biology and iGEM into our exhibit. In response, our team created a video introducing BacPack for the IONIS team’s “scientific popularization” project to introduce BacPack to a wide audience.