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Team:KU Leuven/Project/DataPage
From 2013.igem.org
Secret garden
Congratulations! You've found our secret garden! Follow the instructions below and win a great prize at the World jamboree!
- A video shows that two of our team members are having great fun at our favourite company. Do you know the name of the second member that appears in the video?
- For one of our models we had to do very extensive computations. To prevent our own computers from overheating and to keep the temperature in our iGEM room at a normal level, we used a supercomputer. Which centre maintains this supercomputer? (Dutch abbreviation)
- We organised a symposium with a debate, some seminars and 2 iGEM project presentations. An iGEM team came all the way from the Netherlands to present their project. What is the name of their city?
Now put all of these in this URL:https://2013.igem.org/Team:KU_Leuven/(firstname)(abbreviation)(city), (loose the brackets and put everything in lowercase) and follow the very last instruction to get your special jamboree prize!
Data Page
Welcome to our data page! Here we will summarize neatly everything we achieved this summer. Of course, if you want a more extensive explanation you should check out the corresponding wiki page.
Wetlab & Modelling
The glucose model
The oscillator model
We designed our own oscillator system...
Ecology
Two companies specialized in insects were very interested in our project. They invited us to perform experiments at their facilities. These experiments proved that methyl salicylate not only attracts predators but also activates & protects the plant against aphids. They also proved that aphids are driven away by methyl salicylate.
We also made a model that predicts how our semiochemicals will be dispersed in the environment, which might enable us to predict how far two stickers with BanAphids should be apart.
Human Practices & Outreach
The end user
To make sure that we have a product that is worth to be launched we asked Biobest & pcfruit why they were so interested in our product. We also asked farmers whether they would use our BanAphids and the results were definitely positive!
Ethics
As a result of our unique collaboration between philosophers and scientists, we formulated several new approaches to ethical and philosophical considerations. The best example is the descriptive evaluation in which all team members and supervisors were interviewed about their ethical beliefs. This bottom-up collaboration between students is a new starting point for approaching human practices within the iGEM competition. We also explained why iGEM should inform the general public using the ideas of philosopher Hannah Arendt and we examine the responsability of the synthetic biologist using the ideas of philosopher Hans Jonas. This is not only a first time in the iGEM competition, but has also never been done in literature!
Beside this we have done many other things concerning ethics, which can be found under human practices.
Outreach
We organized a symposium for the general public for which we also invited the other BeNeLux teams to present their project. We hope that one day this will become a yearly tradition in the iGEM competition
We went to schools to teach them about synthetic biology. For this we made our very own Plexiglas "biobricks" wich the students can use to work on excercises.
