Around this time of the year, the iGEM teams start firing up their projects, speeding up on the scientific design, the safety aspects and planning the experiments. How is the iGEM 2021 team of Wageningen University and Research developing the science behind its project, Cattlelyst? Here’s an indication of some behind the scene from our team!
iGEM at WUR starts as an extracurricular activity, though each team member is eventually spending their own minor or (mostly) major thesis project working on the science development for the iGEM project.Our team is helped by an enthusiastic group of supervisors, including PhD students, teachers and professors from the departments of Systems and Synthetic Biology and Microbiology The supervisors think along with us and give us feedback on our ideas, stirring the development of the science. The scientific aspects that make up the full iGEM project are divided into subprojects. These subprojects eventually each constitute a thesis project, you could see them as pieces of a puzzle. Thanks to tight collaboration between the team members, we will make sure to have all the puzzle pieces needed to build our SynBio application as solid as possible.
Let’s zoom in on how the science is worked out. I’ll guide you along our science development process by taking as example the development of safety mechanisms, a fundamental aspect that each iGEM project has to consider. In our team, we initially formed a subgroup of 4 that had to dive into the biosafety puzzle pieces. In the course of a week, the members of the subgroup have a full immersion into the literature of the topic and plan at least one meeting to brainstorm and define an action plan. The online meeting always ends with tasks division and eventually, everyone contributes to building a presentation. In this way, the findings and ideas gathered by us are shared with the supervisors during weekly meetings. The feedback is then carefully taken into consideration and helps us to think of approaches characterised by both creativity and feasibility.
The definition of Cattlelyst’s science proceeds steps by step until the outline of all the thesis projects is defined. Then, each of the students gets to choose (in a very democratic way) the topic that will be worked out as their thesis project. From there on, each student is paired with a supervisor, depending on where their interests and expertise lies. This allows a tight and targeted collaboration, in which there is space for shaping the subproject (in other words the small piece of the big science puzzle) on the interests of each student.
So here we are. The workflow of each thesis and the planning are slowly coming together. We are getting ready for a Summer of hard work by arranging rooms for group work (no small feat under Corona restrictions!), equipment, the right bacterial strains, and first and foremost laboratory access for us all, as far as the Corona measures allow. We look forward to entering the lab, and hopefully get there more chances of interacting in real life with the whole team! Make sure to follow us on the socials for staying updated on our LabLife. We’ll announce when we’ll be starting and we’ll share our lab routine with you.
What to expect in our next blog post? We’ll talk about the background of Cattlelyst, and in case of questions meanwhile, feel free to contact us at igem@wur.nl
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