The Plight of the Horseshoe Crab

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.