Difference between revisions of "Team:Georgia State/Safety"
Vradcliffe1 (Talk | contribs) |
|||
| Line 110: | Line 110: | ||
<div class="span6 ruler-right ruler-bottom"> | <div class="span6 ruler-right ruler-bottom"> | ||
<div class="block"> | <div class="block"> | ||
| − | <p class="last"> If you are | + | <p class="last"> If you are ever looking for GSU-iGEM, were on the fourth floor of Kell Hall, in room 403 or around the corner in room 439. The lab is an M1-Lab, which suites our experimental needs perfectly! In our 439 space, we do all of our molecular work, such as cloning, PCR, transformations, and characterization. In room 403, the team uses that area for the growth of our tobacco plants for future experimentation. When the need arises for the team to do any fluorescence, media sterilization, centrifugation, incubation, or further characterization tests our team has been trained to use the core facilities located in Kell Hall, Petit Science Center, or the Natural Science Center. </p> |
</div> | </div> | ||
</div> | </div> | ||
Revision as of 04:20, 31 October 2017
Safety
"It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed."
Charles Darwin
If you are ever looking for GSU-iGEM, were on the fourth floor of Kell Hall, in room 403 or around the corner in room 439. The lab is an M1-Lab, which suites our experimental needs perfectly! In our 439 space, we do all of our molecular work, such as cloning, PCR, transformations, and characterization. In room 403, the team uses that area for the growth of our tobacco plants for future experimentation. When the need arises for the team to do any fluorescence, media sterilization, centrifugation, incubation, or further characterization tests our team has been trained to use the core facilities located in Kell Hall, Petit Science Center, or the Natural Science Center.
Our home away from the lab is the stem suite on the fifth floor of Kell Hall. In this space, we planned out our project, set out our weekly goals, laid out our community outreach plans, assemble our educational Lego bags for local after-school programs, and process our results. This summer since our team was seeking to make our lab space more accessible to anyone with disabilities, in the suite the team could freely watch instructional videos to learn American Sign Language alphabet and plan how to rearrange our lab for better instructional purposes. Oh, yeah, it was also a safe space to have a sweet snack or lunch.
We hosted a lecture by microbiologist Dr. Hammer. Dr. Hammer studies cell signaling in thebacterial pathogen Vibrio cholerae, and during his talk, Dr. Hammer discussed how he uses genetic engineering for his research. His lab studies microbial interactions at scales that span genes and genomes, regulatory networks, cells, populations, and communities. Harmful and beneficial bacteria are genetically encoded with regulatory networks to integrate external information that tailors gene expression to particular niches. Bacteria use chemical signals to orchestrate behaviors that facilitate both cooperation and conflict with members of the communities they inhabit. His work focuses on the waterborne pathogen Vibrio cholerae, which causes the fatal diarrheal disease cholera in humans and also resides in aquatic settings in association with other animals and surfaces like crab shells and zooplankton molts composed of chitin.
Arri Eisen is a Professor of Pedagogy in biology and in the Graduate Institute for Liberal Arts; he is also the Teaching Coordinator for FIRST, a National Institutes of Health-supported postdoctoral fellowship program in research and teaching. Dr. Eisen received his undergraduate degree in 1985 in biology with honors from UNC-Chapel Hill and his PhD in Biochemistry from UW-Seattle in 1990. In addition to being on the Center faculty, Arri Eisen is a Professor of Pedagogy in Biology and in the Institute for Liberal Arts; he is also the Teaching Coordinator for FIRST, a National Institutes of Health-supported postdoctoral fellowship program in research and teaching, and a leader of the Emory Tibet Science Initiative, which has been working over the last decade with the Dalai Lama to educate Tibetan monks and nuns in science. Dr. Eisen received his undergraduate degree in 1985 in biology with honors from UNC-Chapel Hill and his PhD in Biochemistry from UW-Seattle in 1990. He has been teaching at Emory since then and joined the Center in the late 90’s where his main responsibilities now include teaching in the Center&'s Master of Arts in Bioethics and in Emory's Master of Science in Clinical Research programs. Dr. Eisen publishes in the peer-reviewed literature in science, science education, and bioethics, as well as in the popular literature. His most recent book is The Enlightened Gene: Biology, Buddhism and the Convergence that Explains the World. Dr. Eisen spoke about CRISPR technology and the future of creating human babies without certain medical conditions and specific preferred traits.
Our Synthetic Biology Club hosted a speaker series on campus during the spring semester.
The primary focus of Dr. Styczynski research is the experimental and computational study of the dynamics and regulation of metabolism, with ultimate applications in metabolic engineering, biotechnology, and biosensors/diagnostics. He spoke of the importance of micronutrient deficiencies and the importance of having an accessible and affordable way to measure deficiencies. Micronutrient deficiencies are a significant healthcare concern across the globe. Significant even in some developed nations, micronutrient deficiencies are more severe in the developing world and locally in the wake of major disasters. These conditions, though easily treated, remain a problem because they are often difficult to recognize and diagnose, requiring lab tests that are prohibitively expensive in both material and human resources for those in developing or remote areas. As obligate consumers of the same micronutrients, bacteria possess cellular machinery to control intracellular micronutrient levels and have corresponding regulatory mechanisms to respond to varying concentrations in their environment. His lab is developing a novel medical test based on bacterial sensors using designed genetic circuitry to direct existing or minimally engineered cellular machinery to trigger specific changes in color in response to defined micronutrient levels. Such a test would be cheap, requiring no complex equipment and minimal medical training to administer and interpret. This would obviate the logistical problem of laboratory access and sample transport in remote and low-resource environments, allowing on-site diagnosis of micronutrient deficiencies in the populations most at risk.
