Team:DTU-Denmark/Achievements/BioBrick Workshop

The iGEM competition is not only about developing fascinating solutions to global or everyday problems using synthetic biology. It is about sharing knowledge and experience with your fellows. It is about achieving great results, together with like-minded people, as well as sharing your achievements with others to help them achieve even greater results, and thereby in the end creating valuable solutions for the society.

It is our experience at the 2014 DTU iGEM team that a good start is essential for a research project to be successful in all aspects. Since our team consists of several trained wetlab biotech students we chose to take advantage of our experience and arrange and carry out a workshop for all other Danish iGEM teams to help them get their iGEM projects started.

Our overall intention was to provide the other teams with a solid introduction to the iGEM competition, how to create a great wiki-website and a basic hands-on experience with essential laboratory techniques to enable their work with engineering of biological systems.

The BioBrick Workshop concept is to gather the iGEM teams of Denmark (UCPH, SDU and DTU) for a social learning experience about the core of iGEM, genetical engineering and safety. We decided to adapt the programme from the BioBrick Workshop 2013 organised by the previous year's DTU iGEM team to fit the settings of this year.

The BioBrick Workshop 2014 was hosted from Friday 2^nd early afternoon until Sunday 4^th late afternoon, May 2014, at DTU. Here the Danish iGEM 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.

Figure 1: Hardworking Danish iGEM participants learning and improving their genetical engineering skills.

Another important purpose of the weekend was to generate team feeling within the different teams. This was achieved by social dinners every evening after a day packed with lectures and exercises in the laboratory.