Throughout the competition we’ve had the opportunity to meet people from the Synthetic Biology community and other fields of Science thanks to workshops, seminar and conference days we attended or by just contacting them.

These interactions definitely shaped our project and gave us a broader view of the scope of Synthetic Biology and iGEM.

Here, we share with you a few of these encounters and what we drew out of them.

SynBio Soc conference in Oxford

To start the summer with a boost, the team made a road trip to attend the Oxford iGEM conference.

Meeting for the first time other iGEM teams was definitely the highlight of the event. There was a real buzz and we came back vibrant to start our project.

Exchanging project ideas helped us by allowing us to gage which of our initial ideas caught the interest the most.

The drive home cam all too soon.

“The aspect that struck out the most was the comradery and friendliness of all the teams. You didn’t feel competitive rivalry; it was really about sharing ideas”

Randy Rettburg

"Effort, Integrity, Openness"

Randy came to meet the team in June. He told us about his start in computer design, how he met Tom Knight and his vision for iGEM. “Find the truth, stick to it and have fun”, he told us.

Getting a historical perspective of iGEM placed the competition in a wider context: iGEM is driven by students like us! Speaking to him made us feel part of this movement, striving for openness, open exchange of ideas, parts, information and resources that we all contribute and take from.

John Sayers

We had the chance to meet John during our crash course. He found and promoted the use of T5 exonuclease. Through our conversation we learnt more about the biology of the enzyme and DNA assembly method. It made us realize the years of work that were dedicated to setting up the tools we now use every day for our own experiments. The encounter also made it clear the importance of understanding the basic biology of the procedures we do- only with this understanding can we rationalize why things go wrong!

Poster session at the Sainsbury Laboratory

This gave us an opportunity to discover what other summer students in the Plant Sciences Department had been working on. It also let us share our project in poster form for the first time!

Café Synthetique

Synthetic Biology enthusiasts from around Cambridge gather once a month in a pub behind the Chemistry Department. We were invited to present our work in this informal setting. We discussed our ideas with people from a range of disciplines and received a lot of great advice on how to effectively communicate.

Meet up with the UEA team

We travelled up to the Norwich Research Park to exchange ideas with the UEA team. We were also given a tour of the area. including the impressively large growth facility.

YSB 2.0

The team attended the Young Synthetic Biology Conference in August. Firstly it was lovely to find back familiar faces from the Oxford Conference. To find out how their ideas had changed, advanced and developed.

We presented our project. It was great to see the excitement that arose from the audience, their immediate engagement and questions that came up.

The gaps in our speech became apparent and gave us the opportunity to improve.

To our delight, we met a team working on the same enzyme as us and shared experiences. We also set up collaborations with a team to standardize protocols and to research in iGEM team dynamics.

iGEM alumni

Throughout the summer we had the chance to meet iGEM alumni. Their tips were very valuable.

Theo who had set up a winning wiki helped us think about design and presentation of our work.

Matt gave us throughout the competition concrete organizational advice as well as motivational boosts and reminders of deadlines!

We met an old iGEM Cambrian at a conference who after the competition decided to enter the field of Synthetic Biology as a PhD student.

Bernado had taken part in the Chilean iGEM team; this gave us an insight to the iGEM experience on another continent. We were told: “the hard works, trials, errors and fun are all the same wherever you are; just the weather changes!”

Thank you to all the other people who dedicated their time in teaching us and sharing their experiences. For us iGEM became a lot more than lab work; it changed our views of Science, our preconceived ideas and gave us an opening to a community we would have never reached and come to love.