Team:British Columbia/HP

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  • Synthetic Biology Gone Wild
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So you want to be an iGEMer
by: Ayjchan

Mentoring Young Scientists - (Outreach at Science World on September 20, 2011)

The UBC iGEM 2011 team collaborated with Science World and Future Leaders in Science to deliver a synthetic biology workshop to select high school students and potentially foster the creation of a high school British Columbia iGEM team!

We are thankful to Dr. Catherine Anderson, Program Manager of Future Science Leaders for the opportunity to take part in this innovative program!

We introduced synthetic biology and iGEM to the high school students and guided them through a plasmid activity aimed at solving a real world problem by creating a plasmid with appropriate parts. Our workshop outline can be found at the wiki for iGEM outreach.

UBC Orientation (September 6, 2011)

Imagine UBC is the University's orientation and transition program for undergraduate students. 5,000 first-year students, along with upper-year students, and the greater UBC community, are invited to The Main Event, a showcase of campus life with over 200 informative resource booths! We gave strawberry DNA extraction demos and asked students what they thought synthetic biology meant!

A DIY quick protocol: mash up strawberries, mix thoroughly with salt and soap water, filter through a coffee filter or cheesecloth and aliquot the liquid filtrate into microcentrifuge tubes. Carefully add ethanol on top of the water layer, rotate gently and see the DNA precipitate out into the ethanol layer (the shimmery bubbly stuff). I think I see a double helix!

What IS synthetic biology?

In 2010, we asked hundreds of students for their definition of synthetic biology and produced this word cloud based on the frequency of keywords:

In 2011, we again asked hundreds of students for their definition of synthetic biology and produced a second word cloud:

Looks like the same keywords keep popping up: Biology, Making, Creating, Man-Made, Synthetic, Fake, Artificial, DNA, life.

Check out this xtranormal video inspired by the answers we got from hundreds of undergraduates!

What is Synthetic Biology?
by: syntheticbiology