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Team:Cambridge-JIC/Community/Outreach
From 2014.igem.org
Overview
Lab tour for Summer School Students
In August, Cambridge University becomes home for thousands of school students from across Europe, who come to improve their understanding of subjects from every part of the academic spectrum.
We invited a group attending courses at Emmanuel college for a tour of our lab and the plant sciences department, and showed them how synthetic biology and genetic modification works at a practical level.
The students are going on to become lawyers and linguists as well as biologists and medics, and let us know that
"it was great to meet the nuts and bolts of what scientists do, genetic modification doesn't seem so mysterious any more!"
We taught them about the indescribable joys of pipetting, and what needs to be done to get a gene from an eppendorf into a plant.
Visit by the school iGEM team from St Paul's School
In September we welcomed what will be next year's school iGEM team from St Paul's School in London.
We discussed their ideas for the project they have planned for next year, which involves a James Bond-esque assassin E. coli that can discretely force a toxic plasmid into unwanted bacteria. It is a fascinating idea and we are looking forward to seeing how it goes!
We also showed them around our lab, explained our project, and gave some tips about wetwork and how to keep a project on track. We were lucky enough to be joined during the visit by Gos Micklem of the Micklem lab in the department of genetics and Luke Browning, who is working on a potato protein that may drastically improve the shelf life of potatoes by preventing sprouting of tubers. The group therefore also got to learn about the unexpected partnerships often forged in science, because it turns out that extracting DNA and proteins from marchantia requires the same thinking and buffers as extracting from potatoes (as both contain high levels of polyphenolic compounds which can hinder these extractions). We wish the team the best of luck in next year's competition!
