This year we collaborated with four iGEM teams! Details can be found on our Collaborations Page
HUMAN PRACTICES
Our silver Human Practices were built on inspiration from our Northern roots and conversations with community members. We worked to develop an initiative for Education and Engagement for synthetic biology in Northern British Columbian communities. Read more about our initiative “Bringing Synthetic Biology to the North”.
GOLD MEDAL CRITERIA
INTEGRATED HUMAN PRACTICES
We expanded on our silver medal activity by integrating conversations with community members, and professionals to enhance and guide our project direction. Read more about our Integrated Human Practices!
PROOF OF CONCEPT
We set out to determine whether or not protein Hfq is required for sRNA-mRNA hybridization in Staphylococcus aureus. Use of a fluorescence polarization (FP) assays demonstrated that wells containing only sRNA compared to wells containing both sRNA and mRNA successfully showed that the RNA was hybridizing; therefore, we concluded that sRNA mediated gene silencing is possible in Staphylococcus species without the inclusion of Hfq on the vector delivered to target cells. More can be read here.
As our project has been developed in a multi-stage plan, we designed a successful qPCR assay for future use in measuring gene knockout efficiency in vivo. More can be read here.
