Team:UCL/Notebook

Notebook

January

First meeting was held after the team had been assembled. Introductions to each other and team building exercises take place to familiarise to help everyone get to know each other. Discussions take place with previous iGEM team members from UCL so the new team gain some context and guidance concerning how to approach an iGEM project.

Each member of the new team was told to present for 5 minutes on a 2012 based team, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. Further discussions about the general area 'track' that the team would be interested in. Given that many team members have a medical sciences background, medical based ideas were favoured among the majority of the team.

February

First meeting was held after the team has been assembled. Introduction to each other and team building exercises take place to familiarise the team members with each other. Discussions take place with previous iGEM team members from UCL so the new team have some context and guidance concerning how to approach any iGEM project.

• Weight control yoghurt

• Anti-cancer yoghurt

• Zebrafish water cleaning system for Third World

• Athletic Drug testing

• Clean Urban Air

• Neural network with glowing bacteria and fibre optics

• Clean Urban Air

Visited a DIY SynBio group at The Arts Catalyst for feedback on our project ideas and to display posters we can created for them, in order to get feedback from the members of the public who came to the venuw for synbio workshops. Some of the members there were previous iGEM candidates from several countries, with many liking the anti cancer yoghurt idea. In general, the publlic found medical projects more appealing, partly becuase they tried to solve tangible problems that cannot be mitigated soley by 'electrical' or 'mechnaical' technologies. The 'neural networks' idea gathers interest with scientists at Cancer Reserach UK and members of the public alike becuase bringing apllying synethtic biology to study neuroscience seems both innovative and relatively original. The zebrafish idea gathers interest becuase of the novel chassis. The other ideas do not do so well due to commonly being seen in iGEM, and being common promises of synthetic biology in general.

March

Final meetings before exams, both internally and at the Arts Catalyst. In the mean time we had taken on board our feedback, and took the best ideas from each of the most popular project to come up with a new idea that combined takling a medical condition, with neuroscience, with using a novel chassis in an Alzheimer's disease project. The idea pool has now been narrowed down to:

• Anti-cancer yoghurt

• Zebrafish

• Alzheimer's disease

• Neural Network

Members of the group also held a probiotic yoghurt workshop for the anti-cancer project, where members of the public made yoghurt. The audience were informed about the project and opinions were gathered.