Team:DTU-Denmark/Team/Attributions

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Attributions



Overview

Several months of brainstorming, discussions and literature search as well as meetings with different faculty members from the Technical University of Denmark resulted in a joint decision on working on the Spinach project. The initial idea about measuring promoter strengths in absolute terms originates from one of our team members, Kristian Jensen, and associate professor Chris Workman hinted us about the spinach concept. The obvious applicability of the project and huge potential has been a main driving force for all of us, together with our fascination of XX (something with green or spinach). The formation of our team was facilitated by Associate Professor Chris Workman, but the project management, planning, fundraising as well as the designs, work described on this wiki, our results and our submitted BioBricks was done by ourselves. Nevertheless, we owe a thank to several people for constructive feedback, advice, guidance and for encouraging our work.

Students

Initially we divided the team into different subgroups created with regard to our competences at that time and personal intentions for gaining new skills. Our contributions therefore very much reflect which subgroups we have been in.
Life Science and Beyond
In order to inspire younger university students and spread the word about iGEM we participated in a conference dealing with different initiatives for students interested in expanding their studies to exceed the ordinary study programme. Many students showed interested in iGEM. Tell about what synthetic biology implies.
Biobrick Workshop
Knowledge sharing is an essential part of the development of project. We arranged a workshop for the other iGEM teams.
The DTU iGEM team 2014 decided to repeat the success of the BioBrick workshop hosted by the DTU iGEM team of 2013. The BioBrick workshop is a gathering of the iGEM teams of Denmark (KU, SDU and DTU) for a social learning experience about the core of iGEM and genetical engineering.
The BioBrick workshop was hosted over a weekend at DTU where the teams received lectures about; Primer design for USER-cloning, the online tool PHUSER that can be used for designing primers, the core of iGEM, how to receive medals and Wiki design and editing in iGEM. The teams were also introduced to several need to know laboratory procedures; PCR, Gel electrophoresis, Purification of DNA from agarose gels and USER-cloning.
The overall idea was to give the teams a solid introduction to the iGEM competition, the wiki and a basic hands-on experience with essential laboratory techniques when working with engineering of biological systems.
Another important purpose was to generate team feeling within the different teams, this was achieved by social dinners after days of lectures and exercises in the lab.