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Team:UEA-JIC Norwich/UKConference
From 2011.igem.org
THE UK iGEM MEET UP
As a team, we wanted to help other iGEM competitors get the most out of their experience. Entering a synthetic biology competition with relatively little prior lab experience can be a daunting task. Most of the students who enter the competition will never have followed a science project for such an extended period, and will almost certainly never have designed the project. However, we also firmly believe that there is a lot to be gained from participating in the competition.
To that end, we decided we could most benefit the other teams by hosting this years annual UK team meet up. We felt that we had a lot to offer students of other teams, both in terms of location and the expertise of staff present. Our team was a collaboration of efforts between the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the John Innes Centre (JIC). The UEA has been regularly ranked in the top five places for student satisfaction in the UK. It was our hope that any students who were looking to completing a PhD in the future might consider UEA as one of their options. The JIC, where our team was primarily based, is one of the world leading research centres, both in terms of Europe and globally, for plant and microbial research. It also boats a large number of post graduate students, and each year takes on more. Some well known and prestigious names operate at both the UEA and JIC, and we were keen to give other teams the chance to explore both sites and arrange meetings with our staff.
Arguably the greatest benefit of the conference was the chance to meet other team members. We felt that interactions between teams would be of vital benefit. We ourselves had been wondering where we stood in comparison to other teams; whether we had progressed as far as we should have; how outlandish was our project in comparison to others; and lastly but certainly not least: had we bitten off more than we could chew? The conference allowed team members to ascertain the answers to all of these questions during the short, twenty minute presentations we organised to be held by each team. All of these were fascinating, and will soon be uploaded onto our WIKI for the viewing pleasure of other teams, both those that participated and other teams from further afield who are interested.
We also arranged a series of talks by presenters we felt would be interesting to other teams. Our own Supervisor, Dr Paul O Maille gave a talk about his work on Turpene structure, evolution and applications, as well as sharing his views on the idea of synthetic biology as a whole, still a much disputed concept.
