Oxford Biochemistry Alumni Event @ the Royal Society

Team members Glen Gowers and Philipp Lorenz attended the 2014 London Biochemistry Alumni Event hosted at the Royal Society. The occasion attracted alumni from across a period of more than 50 years – bringing together those who completed their PhDs in the 1950s, with students graduating last year. Following an introduction by Head of Department Mark Sansom and talks from two Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers, our iGEM team members entertained guests with their presentation.

Synthetic Biology: Short Past, Long Future

Oxford iGEM meet up in collaboration with SynOX

On June 19th 2014, the Oxford iGEM team invited all of the teams in the UK and Ireland to the first British and Irish meet-up of 2014. Hosted in the Oxford University Biochemistry Department and co-organised with the Oxford Society for Synthetic Biology (SynOx), the event was attended by 15 iGEM teams as well as Oxford University undergraduates and postgraduates.

The day included three talks about synthetic biology and iGEM:
Dr Jarek Bryk (National Centre for Biotechnology Education, University of Reading – current mentor of Reading iGEM) spoke about what it takes to get synthetic biology incorporated into university teaching and about his dedicated efforts towards establishing the Reading University iGEM team.
The iGEM supervisor’s perspective was presented to us by Dr Richard Kelwick (researcher at the EPSRC National Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, Imperial College London) along with the lessons he has learned from being a mentor to the past three Imperial College teams.
Last, but certainly not least, Randy Rettberg (Founder and President of the iGEM foundation) imparted to us his vision of synthetic biology as the next revolution in humanity’s technological development.

The talks were filmed to enable a livestream feed of the event to be broadcast live to those unable to attend: even allowing them to be involved in the question and answer session.
Later in the afternoon came the first opportunity for the UK and Irish teams to get to know each other, initially by chatting over sandwiches before moving out of the department to the less formal setting of the pub. To facilitate this discussion the teams had been invited to provide a simple poster to display their main project themes and ideas.

Our thanks to SynOx and to all those who attended! We would like to thank Randy Rettberg, Dr. Richard Kelwick and Dr. Jarek Bryk for their insightful and entertaining talks.

Synthetic Biology and Restriction Enzymes Talk @ Question of Taste Workshop

Audience:

15-20 A2-level Biology students (17-18 years old) and their teachers

The Brief:

Give 20-25minute presentation about synthetic biology focusing on molecular biology techniques during the University Museum of Natural History ‘A Question of Taste’ day-long workshop.

Content:

In the course of the day the students undertook PCR, restriction enzyme digest and gel electrophoresis so we discussed how these techniques could be used in synthetic biology.

PUT PRESENTATION HERE!

We also developed a model of a plasmid and insert to demonstrate complementary ends and the problems with a one enzyme restriction digest and how this can be overcome by a double restriction enzyme digest.

How were we informed by the survey and focus groups?

- Addressing the concern raised in our focus group that the possibilities presented about synthetic biology are ‘over-hyped’ we only gave examples of synthetic biology projects that have been successfully undertaken. - Included discussion as to why we use antibiotic resistance genes (which in one session lead to a discussion of alternative selectable markers).

What did we improve for our second go?

The second time round added in an animation to show how restriction enzyme sites can be added to a fragment of DNA by PCR.

Workshop

UNIQ

Sheffield

YSB