"
Team:Cambridge-JIC/Community/Sci
From 2014.igem.org
SynBioSoc conference in Oxford
To start the summer with a boost, we made a road trip to attend the Oxford iGEM meetup.
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 and eager to start on our project.
Exchanging ideas helped us judge which of our initial ideas caught the interest the most.
The drive home came all too soon.
“The aspect that struck out the most was the warmth and friendliness of all the teams. We didn’t feel competitive rivalry, it was really about sharing ideas”
Randy Rettberg
"Effort, Integrity, Openness"
Randy came to meet us in June. He told us about his career start in 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! Randy's talk highlighted the importance of striving for openness, open exchange of ideas, parts, information and resources that we all contribute and take from - and made us feel part of this movement.
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 with him we learned more about the biology of the enzyme and about the Giibson 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 clarified the importance of understanding the basic biology of the procedures we do - only with this understanding can we rationalize why things go wrong! (picture credit: John Sayers)
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! (picture credit: theguardian.com)
Café Synthétique
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.
Visit to the John Innes Centre and meeting with the UEA team
We travelled up to the Norwich Research Park to see our JIC advicer, George Lomonosoff, and exchange ideas with the UEA team. We were also given a tour of the area, including the impressively large growth facility. It was a great chance to meet face to face with our RFC collaborators (RFC 105: Standardized Plant Syntax) and debate our ideas.
YSB 2.0
The team attended the Young Synthetic Biology Conference in August. Firstly it was lovely to see familiar faces from the Oxford Conference, and to find out how their ideas had changed, advanced and developed.
We presented our project. It was really encouraging to see the excitement that arose from the audience, their immediate engagement and the questions that came up.
Plus it was a great opportunity to reflect on and improve our presentation technique.
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.
