Team:REC-CHENNAI/Human Practices
Human Practices
As a team, we believe that science should reach all communities of society in an engaging way. Consequently, we customized our Human Practices activities to connect with different communities, thus qualifying us for this award. In collaboration with Cambrionics Life Sciences, we designed a training module including hands-on experiments and biology-based takeaway game board for school students. This will be conveyed to a lot more schools in future. On Engineer’s Day, we educated nearly 300 school students on the handling of basic lab instruments. We presented our project at a National Conference attended by undergrad students. We connected with a huge crowd of the general public at Elliot’s beach to clear taboos surrounding the field. In an event at the Natesan park, we engaged the kids with science-based activities. We organized a workshop in which different levels of safety was discussed through thought-provoking activities. As part of our community outreach activities, a discussion on Genetic Engineering, made in our native language was aired by a local community radio station. We had a brief discussion about our project with a group of PhD scholars working around the field same as ours. All activities were followed by survey forms tailored to assess their impact.
Integrated Human Practices
The compelling factors qualifying us for this award are the number and diversity of activities on grounds of idea conceptualization, part designing, biobrick characterization, experimental framework, safety and modelling. We overlooked conjugating our cargo with CPP, as recommended by Dr.Srujan to improve efficiency. The same was suggested by one of our internal faculties, Dr.Rajasekar. As advised by Dr.Karunagaran, we reconsidered our initial choice of gene selection for idea validation. We included yeast strain as suggested by Dr.Gopi, for broader characterization of Latarcin peptides. As insisted by Dr.Naveen, we switched to the universal system of double diluting test samples for MIC assay. We redesigned our shRNA into shRNA-like siRNA as advocated by Dr.Rohit to favour dicer-independent strand-separation. As emphasized by Dr.Balasubramanian, we attempted optimizing nucleotide:peptide ratio than merely following literature data. We considered validating shRNA-binding by quantitative Fluorescence-Spectrophotometry than Fluorescence-Microscopy as guided by Dr.Madhavan. Acknowledging Ms.Priya’s rationale, we simplified our confirmatory experiment to validate RNA-interference through qRT-PCR only. Upon Dr.Johanna’s insistence, we outsourced our Latarcin peptides for characterizing their hemolytic activity