The Plight of the Horseshoe Crab

The University of Virginia iGEM team invited us along with William & Mary, University of Delaware, UNC-Asheville, and the University of Maryland to the Virginia Mid-Atlantic Meetup event. Each team gave a short presentation on their project. After every two presentations, there were break-out sessions. Most of the collaboration took place during the breakout sessions. Due to this opportunity, we were able to discuss and ask questions to the other teams about their projects. The discussions helped us think about our project on an introspective level. Through our conversations with William & Mary, we realized the importance of the rate of protein expression in a vector and its relation to our protein expression rates. Analyzing how each group presented improved our overall presentation technique. After every presentation and break out session the Community Bio Labs from Charlottesville presented and then we had one final breakout session. This break-out session was the most important because we were able to speak directly with someone who had used HCG and pregnancy tests as a detection device. The conversation made us think about the concentration levels pregnancy tests detect and how we may need to alter our detection mechanism.

The Plight of the Horseshoe Crab

To understand the plight of the horseshoe crab we decided to reach out to our local authorities, the Georgia Aquarium. The aquarium was able to provide an immersive learning environment. At the Georgia Aquarium, we were able to learn about the crab from our tour guide Max and able to touch the horseshoe crab, it was a tad bit slimy but cute nevertheless. On our tour, we were made aware that horseshoe crabs are crucial to the food webs of many species and that with the depletion of the horseshoe crab population we see a reduction of a lot of other species, especially certain types of birds. The crisis that the horseshoe crab faces was made clear by our tour guide, with the crabs serve as valuable resources for commercial fishers and the biomedical industry. But, in recent years concerns have been raised about the decline in Limuli population. Click on the tabs to learn about crab population threats and environmental impact of crab population depletion.