Difference between revisions of "Team:NYU Abu Dhabi/HP/Gold Integrated"

High School Workshop

On October 1, 2017, the NYUAD iGEM team invited 18 high school students and 2 teachers from Brighton College in Abu Dhabi, UAE, to experience an iGEM research environment. This one-day workshop provided the students with the opportunity to channel their interest in both biology and engineering. This is the first high school workshop that is tailored to exposing talented high school students to iGEM in the UAE.

In the beginning of the workshop, the NYUAD team gave a presentation on iGEM and how the students can get involved by potentially joining future NYUAD teams. Through this presentation, the students also learned the important connection between biology and engineering in the context of iGEM and the synthetic biology field. This presentation was followed by the first workshop of the day: GLO, Bacteria, GLO, which taught the students how to transform pGLO DNA into the E. coli cloning vector using the heat shock method. The NYUAD team walked them through basic laboratory techniques and bacterial transformation, which is integral to an iGEM team’s success. The students then experienced the engineering environment through the second workshop Arduino + LED, which taught the students how to integrate many elements to create a device such as interactive design, programming, and circuitry. The students learned the basics of programming and circuit design by creating their own simple circuit using LEDs and Arduino, an open source electronic platform. Besides completing the workshop, the students also received a copy of the NYUAD team’s magazine Synthetic Biology 101 as a source for further learning about the advances in synthetic biology.

The NYUAD team is proud to have pioneered the first iGEM-specific workshop for high school students in the UAE. The workshop achieved the original aim of propagating the impact of iGEM in the region and encouraging interest in scientific research among high school students. In the future, the NYUAD team envisions similar workshops that can reach a larger audience in the UAE.

Surveys

Over the summer break, the team returned to their respective home countries and conducted surveys and interviews with local food vendors to gauge interest and feedback on our project. Of all the participants, none of them know what Shiga Toxin was and how prevalent it is in uncontrolled environments where food is sold. Upon knowing the dangers of the toxin, they became interested in protecting their food from such a toxin and so we presented them our project idea to devise a cheap yet effective detection method.

The food vendors raised concerns that such a device should be very easy to use and understand, it should be lightweight and should not require electricity. The emphasized that a useful device should take less than an hour for the entire process. Based on their responses, we developed our project accordingly. In order to simplify the process to the least number of steps, the chip was designed with two main components; the inlet where the sample can be easily poured in and then the reaction chamber where the reaction and its result can be easily and safely viewed. The chip was also designed to be lightweight and so it was limited to a size less than 100x100mm. To reduce cost as low as possible, the heater and chip holder were 3D printed for rapid fabrication at low cost. The heater itself is a heat pack that requires no electricity yet it is able to sustain the reaction temperature at 65 Celcius for 6 hours, meaning that the same heating pack could be used for as many as 12 successive tests as each test takes a maximum of 30 minutes. These design elements combine to make our device incredibly cheap, compared to their professional laboratory counterparts.

After these design considerations were taken, we surveyed the general population and found that, similarly, few knew about Shiga Toxin specifically. Many individuals have had previous food poisoning experiences and were interested in learning more about our device. While most of their feedback was in agreement with the food vendors surveyed previously, they also voiced that they would only be willing to wait a maximum of 30 minutes for the results before consumption. In this regard, the biology team took steps to decrease the lysis process and found that using the LAMP technique, a heat lysis was not required. The reaction time was optimized and reduced to 20 minutes, with immediate visualization.