Team:York/HP/Silver
The Local Community
We value the inclusion of local communities in the world of science and we have tried, during the iGEM project, to actively stimulate the involvement of the people in the vicinity of the University of York in science. To this end, several of our team members visited Lord Deramore's Primary School during their "Science Week" in July 2017. We took some activities with us to introduce the Year 6 class to the scientific method. While they used our props to explore each of The Five Senses, we discussed with them how the scientific method can be applied to this kind of experimentation to come to valuable conclusions about the world. We hoped to inspire some interest in science and it seemed to do the trick! We got a lot of questions from the children, including some that we were not able to answer. Both the teachers at the school and our team were very happy with the enthusiasm that we saw.
Further, we met with an aspiring science journalist, Josh Male, who wrote an article about our project here. This was a great way to get the word out to a wider audience concerning what we have tried to do as part of the iGEM competition.
The Scientific Community
Since the start of this project, we have considered the QWACC as something that would be useful for research and industrial applications. Hence, we wanted to ensure that the needs of our demographic (primarily researchers) were met. We spoke to Dr. Richard Kasprowicz, who works for Phasefocus, about the quality of our holograms. He suggested to us that we should make sure that the brightness of each frame was as even as possible.
We also spoke with Andy White, of the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of York, about the design of our hardware. He helped us to consider the versatility and stability of our DIHM, firstly suggesting that we avoid 3D printing, for reasons outlined here. He also helped us adapt our design so that the degree of magnification could be changed more easily - an important factor for anyone that might use the hardware in a post-iGEM context.
As we approached the end of the project, Dr. Laurence Wilson (Department of Physics) expressed his interest in the possibility of using a Raspberry Pi based, automated DIHM system in remote and/or inaccessible locations, such as the salt mines near Whitby, UK, which are not safe enough for people to perform experiments. Hopefully, this is a sign that we have designed our microscope in a manner that is suited to use in research!
The International Community
We have also tried to extend our human practices beyond the borders of the UK during the project. Our most notable advance overseas was with the iGEM 2017 team from Aachen. While we were testing our DIHM, the Aachen team sent us some samples of Saccharomyces cerevisiae BY4742 - which we were able to examine. A hologram we created from images of their organisms is presented below.
- Figure 1: Hologram created from an image of iGEM 2017 Aachen's S. cerevisiae sample.
There was an issue with our lens alignment, but, using this hologram, we were able to see that S. cerevisiae is around 18 pixels when in focus. This corresponds to 4 µm, which is what we expected from the literature, providing further evidence that our analysis methods are suitable for quantifying the sizes of organisms [1].
References
- [1]: J. P. van Dijken, et al. An interlaboratory comparison of physiological and genetic properties of four Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains, Enzyme and Microbial Technology
