Team:Cornell/notebook

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Cornell University Genetically Engineered Machines

Notebook

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January

January 5th
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{{{tech}}}

Applications for new Cornell iGEM members were due today-- we've got 57!
-Rafael

January 16th
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After an eternity of reading and a gigantic spreadsheet of evaluations, we're finally ready to start interviewing applicants-- 36 of them!
-Rafael

January 25th
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I'm really excited about having these new members on the team. There were many awesome interviews, but now we have to sit down and make hard decisions on who to take, as most of last year's members are graduating, so there's a limit to how many new members we can train. This is going to be a tough weekend.
-Rafael

January 27th
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After several hours of discussion, we decided on our 20 new members! Congratulations, Tim Abbott, Hannah Ajmani, Eric Appel, Ryan Ashley, Nupur Bhatt, Arun Chakravorty, Rebecca Chew, Sharlene Dong, Sara Gregg, Alex Han, Eric Holmes, Corey Kaminsky, Daniel Leach, Jeffrey Ly, Ritvik Sarkar, Mac Sennett, Prashant Sharma, Olga Spassibojko, Yoshiko Toyoda, and Kyle Wheeler!
-Rafael

February

February 1st
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Speed-taboodunit is a mashup of speed-dating, taboo, and whodunit; the idea is that each person writes on a piece of paper something unusual about themselves, underlining the key words, then these pieces of paper are randomly redistributed. Everyone organizes in a speed-dating format, with two lines of people, and you have a minute to talk to them and try to find out if they're the person described on their piece of paper-- with the catch that they can't use any of the underlined words. People who successfully find their person leave the group, but otherwise after the minute everyone moves down the line. As for why we came up with this specific icebreaker, we wanted to hit two key requirements of icebreakers: they have to be fun, and they have to make specific accommodations for being shy or quiet. Because each person has the specific objective of finding their person, this helps them overcome the shyness, and as for the fun, everyone loves taboo!

We had our first full team meeting today with all the new members, introducing them to the iGEM competition, and did an icebreaker we call speed-whodunit! For the next week, they have the assignment of analyzing a previous iGEM project (in groups), and explaining what the project was trying to accomplish, whether synthetic biology was a good approach for this, and reasons for their success or lack thereof.
-Rafael

February 7th
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Our first social event tonight went well! Hopefully with a few more of these we'll have some great team comradery and feel more comfortable around each other.
-Rafael

February 9th
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At our second team meeting we went over the past project analyses, as well as some biology review-- mostly molecular cloning. For the next week, we've assigned more past projects for them to outline in more detail.
-Rafael

February 16th
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Today we went over literature review, went over the past project outlines, and gave a two-week problem-oriented brainstorming and project outline assignment. Now that each member has looked at several past projects and analyzed them, we're moving into brainstorming for this year's project and practicing the development of project pitches.
-Rafael

February 23th
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For the second week of this assignment, we compiled the brainstormed ideas and had members pick which ones they wanted to explore further. We also had a movie night planned, but it fell through :(
-Rafael

March

March 2nd
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Groups over the previous week investigated phage therapy, piezoelectric bacteria, "sticky paper", logic gates / bistable switches, phytases, mycelia, and pressure-adaptive materials. We're keeping the results from those, but doing a second round of brainstorming over the next few weeks-- the idea is to allow the exploration of any ideas that arose while researching the previous round of ideas.
-Rafael

March 9th
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We compiled our second round of ideas, including topics like methanotrophs, a CRISPR knockout system, and suppressor tRNA inducible expression systems. We also took our first team picture, and probably the only one that will have all of last year's and this year's members together!
-Rafael

March 29rd
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A lot of iGEM teams we've looked at don't have much beyond the biology, so we really try hard to do interdisciplinary projects, as they provide a great opportunity for learning to work with different kinds of people.

Spring break knocked out a couple of meetings, but it looks like some research was accomplished nonetheless! The phytase project idea is looking pretty promising-- it incorporates a lot of different disciplines, with stuff for our mechanical and electrical engineers to do, as well as modeling.
-Rafael

April

April 6th
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We've narrowed it down to four project ideas: smokestack reactors (capturing pollutants with bioreactors), incorporation of phytases into anaerobic digesters, mycelial materials, and using bacteria to address issues with artificial implantable kidneys.
-Rafael

April 10th
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We had a call today with Ecovative Design, a company that uses mushrooms to make a biodegradable styrofoam analogue-- our mycelial materials project idea would involve working with them to improve their product. It seems like our interests are aligned and that we should be able to work with them. Exciting!
-Rafael

April 13th
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This meeting was dedicated to project pitches from each of the four ideas, followed by voting on which project we should pursue. Some of our graduate advisors also attended to provide a more seasoned perspective on the viability of each project. After some deliberation and spreadsheet magic, we decided on mycelial materials!
-Rafael

April 20th
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Today we worked on team structure for the summer; Swati will be the overall team leader, with me and Mark coordinating wetlab, Olya taking meeting minutes, Mac running drylab, and Hannah will be managing human practices. Later on in the summer, we will also develop task groups. For the next week, we've also split into groups to research various aspects of the mycelial materials project.
-Rafael

April 26th
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We've compiled initial research on carotenoid pigments, transformation protocols, DNA that may be useful for a basidiomycete toolkit, and a few other topics. Over the next week we'll meet with several professors on campus who work with fungi to see what resources and advice they can provide.
-Rafael

May

May 4th
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We met with Professor Gillian Turgeon, who does fungal transformation with Cochliobolus heterostrophus, an ascomycotic corn pathogen. We can get a few of the genes we've been looking for from her, yay! We also met with Professor Teresa Pawlowska, who directed us towards some other fungi and resources for fungi, as well as provided some background on fungal biology. As for the rest of the semester, we're letting everyone off the hook-- we don't want anyone to fail their exams because of iGEM!
-Rafael

Week 1

(06/10 - 06/16)

Week 2

(06/17 - 06/23)

Week 3

(06/24 - 06/30)

Week 4

(07/01 - 07/07)

Week 5

(07/08 - 07/14)

Week 6

(07/15 - 07/21)

Week 7

(07/22 - 07/28)

Week 8

(07/29 - 08/04)

Week 9

(08/05 - 08/11)

Week 10

(08/12 - 08/18)

Week 11

(08/19 - 08/25)

Week 12

(08/26 - 09/01)

Week 13

(09/02 - 09/08)

Week 14

(09/09 - 09/15)

Week 15

(09/16 - 09/22)

Week 16

(09/23 - 09/29)

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