Team:UIUC Illinois/Collaborations
Troubleshooting and Mentorship with Team Gaston Day School
This year, we contacted Team Gaston Day School for project troubleshooting and mentorship. The video conference took place on July 24th, 2019 with Gaston Day School team member George Luan. We introduced our projects and discussed the roadblocks we were having at the time. George Luan offered our team some valuable tips regarding cloning our glyphosate degradation genes. His advice helped us successfully clone our construct by the end of the summer.
We also mentored their team by offering some options for gTEMP isolations. Since they were having difficulty isolating their protein, we suggested the use of lysates as a probable alternative. Their team took our advice, as lysates allowed them to kill the cells without damaging gTEMP. This satisfied their goal of a cell-free system. We continued to keep in touch after the video conference and update each other with our success.
Instagram Collaboration with Team ITB
We also participated in an Instagram challenge called #DrawYourGEMChallenge, organized by Team ITB. The purpose of the challenge was to spread awareness about Synthetic Biology as an emerging field, and its potential to solve all kinds of problems with the help of Genetically Engineered Microbes, or GEMs. We were provided a template by ITB and were able to summarize our construct in a visual way. We also got to view other featured team’s constructs, which was an interesting preview for the upcoming Jamboree.
