On the 14th and 22th of January 2017, we organized our own literature workshop to facilitate in depth discussion about synthetic biology projects. The entire iGEM Team Bielefeld-CeBiTec 2017 as well as additional students with a strong interest in synthetic biology participated successfully.
Everyone presented an iGEM project to inform us about previous projects and the possibilities the iGEM competition provides. Additionally, presentations about current research were given to enhance discussions about novel projects. By analyzing and discussing former iGEM projects we gained great insight in the structure and the requirements of iGEM.
Among other projects like “The Transformers – from Carbon Dioxide to Biofuel” from the iGEM Team Bielefeld-CeBiTec 2017 and “MARSS - Modulated Acetosyringon Receptor Sensor System” from the iGEM Team Bielefeld-CeBiTec 2010 have been presented. It demonstrated that neither the fixation of carbon dioxide, producing the biofuel isobutanol from carbon dioxide nor a sensor for capsaicin have an innovative character, which is a critical criterion for any successful iGEM project.
Already at the beginning of our project phase, we kept the giant jamboree and our final presentation in mind. Therefore, each team member prepared two presentations in English, to improve our presentation and communication skills in front of a bigger audience.
Several scientific discussions had a great impact on our project. The presentation about the minimal genome promoted the work on our biosafety report. One talk described the application of a FRET system to investigate quorum sensing. This inspired us to utilize FRET for one application in our project.
During the entire weekend, there was one topic that always recurred: CRISPR/Cas9. Due to the very broad range of applications, we identified its huge benefit for our own project. CRISPR/Cas9 is critical for our retention system, to ensure that the unnatural bases are preserved in the genome.
Since this literature workshop contributed significantly to the development of our project, we recommend it to other teams. Looking at previous project is very helpful to identify a novel topic for the next iGEM participation.
Fig.1: Some impressions of our literature workshop.
