Team:Manchester/HumanPracticetest

The team planned and delivered 12 workshops for children aged 11-13 years old as part of the University of Manchester’s Science Stars event. We also held a poster stand at a Community Open Day that saw hundreds of people through its doors. Click here to learn more...

Due to the nature of our chosen topic, ethics has played a major role in the development of the project. Here we address the potential problems of using synbio to produce a synthetic alternative to a natural project, and the ways that we would try to overcome them.

When the methods have been optimised, our project will have the potential to reach commercial success. Here we outline a business plan based around our synthetic alternative to palm oil, including our executive summary, keys to success and financial summary.

We believe that modelling is a vital step in the production of any synbio system. But often the production of such models can be hindered or left out altogether due to lack of expertise. Thus we enlisted the help of another two UK iGEM teams in a quest to educate the iGEM community about the software available to them.

The Knowledge Deficit model describes the common misconception by scientists that ‘The Public’ is simply ignorant of science, and this is the root of all opposition. We had dialogue with numerous industry representatives and environmental activists, and learned that the truth is not as simple as this...

Our iGEM experience began in December ‘12, and since then we have been attending various conferences and discussions around synthetic biology, including the first ever Young Synthetic Biologists (YSB 1.0) conference in London!

Social media is an extremely efficient way of reaching a lot of people at the same time. We used social networking as a means to update all of those who were interested about our current activities, both in the lab and out of it!