Team:Georgia State/Collaborations
Collaborations
"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
Charles Darwin
UVA Meet-Up
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.
Emory
Emory, this year, had a cool project that focused on an issue faced by water refinery plants. Emory found during their visit to their local WaterHub that a primary concern was to come up with an efficient way to deal with constant fluctuating orthophosphate levels. Emory, to address this problem, decided to experiment on increasing the efficiency of organisms to eat phosphate. We assisted Emory in this endeavor by working with four strains of Bacillus subtilis. Two of the strains were wild-type isolated from water donated by the Emory Waterhub, and two of the strains were commercially available Bacillus subtilis. The goal of our work was to see which strain could uptake the most phosphate. To test the bacteria we the protocol provided by Emory, see tab labeled Emory protocol. Then we modified the protocol, see modified protocol. And, finally, because we were lucky enough to visit the Georgia Aquarium a place with an abundant amount of water and a state of the art filtration system we asked the aquarium for some of their unfiltered and filtered water to see if they had some of the same phosphate problems.
We were requested to come back to ASF for 2017 due to how successful our Bio Brick activity was the previous year. We provided children and parents alike with a better understanding of the goals, applications and importance of synthetic biology by utilizing the bio brick activity and the glow fish display. This year, we educated many students and parents on synthetic biology and how to create a BioBrick construct using legos. The BioBrick activity utilizes colorful lego pieces to explain to attendees how to create a biobrick. This process involves selecting a plasmid base, promote sequence, ribosomal binding site and a coding sequence. This year used glow fish to relate how fluorescent proteins are utilized in real life. Glow fish are technicallyGMO’s that are appreciated in everyday life as a result of introducing the coding sequence from jellyfish and put it into the embryo of fish to produce a fluorescent glow. We also took some time to explained previous iGEM projects and their benefits to society. Lastly, we gave out a survey to get a better understanding of how many people are aware of the properties and benefits of CBD oil.
GCDHH
Over the summer the Georgia Center of the Death and Hard-of-Hearing (GCDHH) reached out to our GSU iGEM team to learn about synthetic biology and how they could be a part of the researching world. Without knowing how to approach the obstacle of communicating with one another, we reached out to our Department of Education to find out the best way to present our information to the incoming students. Putting the guidelines we received, we hosted a successful open lab day for the GCDHH students. We had interpreters signing as we were explaining the basics of our lab and the undergraduate research that iGEM has to offer. When we initially agreed to hosting the students, we had no idea how much it would impact our view of synthetic biology. We believe that the knowledge and experience we gain from being a part of iGEM should be accessible to everyone that has an interest. Furthermore, we have created our presentation to be more accessible and have gotten an opportunity to learn sign language.
