iGEM in High Schools

A lot of people are surprised when they find out that iGEM is also open for high school teams. From the start of the summer, we hoped to collaborate with a team taking on the challenge at a different stage of their education to share and compare our experiences. We were delighted when we had the opportunity to contact St Paul’s iGEM team. It is the second year the school has a team; the student initiative has bolstered the set up for future years and teachers are becoming increasingly supportive.

Collaborating with St Pauls

We exchanged a number of emails and our communications eventually led to St Paul’s trip to Cambridge. The event started with a small tour of the town and department during which we discussed our projects. As their competition starts in September they were still planning for the months ahead.

Day trip to Cambridge

We showed them the A to Z of Marchantia transformation and took them to the microscopes where we all saw together the potential Red chromoprotein being expressed in our plantlet. 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 also got talking about their experience as a researcher. It was a great to have people from different points of the ‘science pathway timeline’ talk together. The day finished all too quickly and the St Paul team had to head back.

Differences between Uni and High school iGEM experience

Together we asked ourselves what were the major differences present between University and high-school level; if these were positive, negative and neutral and how we could bridge any gaps. The main points that came up were: - more resources - more interdisciplinary teams - more ambitious projects - wider community/more inter-iGEM events organized were present at University Level when compared to High schools. However the labour intensive work, the ups and down of science projects were present at whatever level and embraced!

In their own words

“I think what we were all most struck by was that unlike at school level, it is much more interdisciplinary and seems to draw people from across the sciences. I can only imagine that to be a good thing, especially since synthetic biology should ideally evolve to become a type of computing / engineering."

"The challenge of iGem became evident as we saw how tough it was even for you to get positive results. I am not sure whether that is a positive thing generally, but in our case it encouraged us to take on our (overly) ambitious project."

Rohani Masouleh

“The most significant difference between High School level and University level iGEM would certainly be the variation in resources available to the respective team. For usit would be very difficult to do PCR, request primers, get companies to sequence the plasmids for us"

"The most significant advantage of the High School iGEM would be the longer period which we can do the research. This may be something teams want to think about and starting it during term time could potentially help quite a bit."

"In term of submissions of parts, it would be great if the BioBrick format could be observed at this moment so us over in the High School division could easily do the ligation without needing to have primers.”

Molecular biology demonstration 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.