In our journey to education and communication, we had
● He shared his experience in iGEM with us, whether as an ambassador of iGEM or as the leader of the CU team who participated in 2019 from Cairo University, the obstacles that CU_iGEM team faced during their participation, and the common mistakes that we should avoid.
● He talked about how we can raise funds for our project, told us about after iGEM community and the method to reach the ambassadors.
This meeting guided our path through the competition, and they had lots of advice:
● We should start thinking about our PI.
● We have to start acting on our plan and start to search for opportunities in funding or training for the wet lab team.
● They recommended starting an event or virtual webinar and we have to focus on each criterion of special prizes.
● Taught our society about Synbio by starting to attract an audience on social media through documentation posts or sarcastic science posts/videos.
● The creative team has to make a trial for the wiki to see the progress in the wiki programming.
● We have to focus on graphical design to use our designs in the wiki.
● The wet lab team has to search for the availability of the reagents and equipment in Egypt before settling on an idea to make sure that we can prove our concept.
As a reflection of the last
● We presented our idea and our progress to the professors from our faculty in the presence of our Pl, this was a chance to introduce the Synthetic Biology concepts and how we can use its concept to solve real-time local problems.
● Discuss our project with them and consider their comments to improve our idea construction.
Following our presentation to the experts, here comes
● We welcomed newcomers to the biotechnology department and took this chance to introduce synthetic biology to them.
Choosing an appropriate speech was a bit critical to us as they have little knowledge about Biotechnology so we had to make it as simple as we could but can deliver the difference between SynBio and Genetic Engineering.
This is the point at which we decided to perform a play to help them catch up on what biotechnology is and its fields, and challenges.
Moreover, we made a survey to gather information about their knowledge of the iGEM Competition and Synthetic Biology.
For the surveys, check the Human practice page.
During the journey, we had a chance to live
● We volunteered to organize the event so that two of us would go as Organizers each day during the event period.
● The second day was our big day where we showed our idea in the presence of the African Ambassadors and this opened the door for discussing the applicability of our project and some modifications we should make.
● The best part of the day was when we got to meet other teams' life and listened to their projects and how their experience in iGEM changed their career pathway.
● This is the day that motivated us the most when we met up with other Asian, and European iGEM meet-ups and greeted them all.
The day when we become officially CU
From our 1st meeting at the faculty, we intended to hold another one to keep our doctors from different departments to be updated with the changes on our idea, and if they have any suggestions or comments, so This was that meeting we became
● We became the team representing Cairo University at iGEM under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ahmed Abdo Elsherif, and Prof. Dr. Faten A. Noureldin.
● Present our project progress and discuss it with lots of experts from different departments in our faculty. All of the audience was convinced by our idea and the dean announced that we will participate this year in iGEM.
It was a great success because no one left a comment on our project scheme we celebrated this occasion with a dish part full of Egyptian platters.
Dean meeting
● This was the first official meeting with our PI, in which we discussed our project.
SynBiotech Event
Our day started with the registration and our attendees were welcomed by receiving the files that will help them in the day and the workshops including today's schedule, motivational quote, pen, and the Alzheimer's symbol.
We divided the attendees into 10 teams randomly by assigning a color to each team and making them choose a colored bracelet during registration. Each team had an instructor from our team to try to simplify any missing points and help them to grasp the right concepts after each session.
1- At the beginning, our PI Prof. Dr. Faten A. Noureldin started by welcoming all of the audience, and then we gave a talk about entrepreneurship in science in which we presented lots of successful start-ups that initiated their project with creative science-based ideas and managed to land their business.
2- After that was a talk about “Intro to synbio and how to construct a genetic circuit” followed by the first workshop to let the attendees apply what they learned from the previous talk. Each team was given a set of stickers that resembled parts of the genetic circuit, and they were asked to assemble them in the correct order.
3- In the second one, we were agitating the stamina of the 10 teams from the attendees, where the workshop was based on real projects from previous iGEM teams. Each team had previously studied the project well, extracted the necessary parts, and challenged his/her team to reconstruct the parts again and see whether they would add a new suggestion to the circuit. Each team presented its work at the end.
We were amazed by their superior ideas, and the little competition ended with a winning group which had been given a little motivational prize, either our pin or a notebook.
4- A talk was about “ What is iGEM? ”, then one about “ Our journey ” until this date.
5- After the break, we had an Alzheimer's circle, where we sat in a circle all together to have an open discussion about Alzheimer's. This was the highlight of the day for us because we were curious about our society's knowledge of the disease.
The following were the proposed questions and the suggested answers.
6- We made a survey and added it to the registration form before the event and asked them to fill it once again after as feedback.
An amazing fact we learned from the survey we made before the day started is that we found that when we talked about the iGEM on the orientation day for the newcomers, they were eager to register for our next event and wrote that they know about iGEM from the orientation day event.
Also, those who registered either know us from our social media or were members of the future teams that wanted to participate in iGEM after they heard about our team.
That felt pretty ambitious because we were able to attract lots of people of different ages through social media and other events, not only that but we also captured their interest in iGEM to the extent that they started to read and prepare for the competition.
The charts indicated that the day was enjoyable and informative for them. You can check the surverys at the
Event with South Valley University
Our meetup with the students of the biotechnology department-Faculty of Science, South-valley University.
In the presence of some of their professors and their dean: Khaled bin Elwaleed and there were impressive interactions and discussions with us between the University's students.
Our goal this time was different because they were from a different city so we had shown them the beauty of SynBio in a simple way and shared some of our experiences (who we are, what is iGEM).
The
The
After that, there was
Again, our day highlight, was
The event in Futures Language Schools
In that event, our goal was the same but the challenge differs, this time with high school students, as at this age, they are not educated about Biotechnology at all, put aside SynBio!
Despite that, we accomplished such great success with them being engaged in our activity, in addition to the school manager's interest to insert a syllabus relating to the SynBio.
The event involved more than one talk about the origins and development of scientific inventions in the last 100 years. And We talked about the iGEM competition, the Egyptian teams that participated in it as an encouragement, and that there is an entire track of teams for high schools.
We also joined students in solving a small case study as a simulation of iGEM projects. The projects were a problem in each track, not in the iGEM project but a public problem. We gave them the problem and ask them to search for the gene responsible for solving this problem. Also, during that, we made them know about how to construct a plasmid and the aim of each part of it.
The last thing we did was we gave the students a survey about Alzheimer's and a little brochure about Alzheimer's disease, which was a brief overview of the disease.
We attended the
The audiences were the ambassadors, other iGEM teams, and start-ups from all around Africa. Our presentation included both a talk about our journey in iGEM from the start and a brief description of our project idea.
For more information about the showcase, you can check this
We were invited by the
The audience at the meetup were students from different universities, African ambassadors, and professors.
This opportunity allowed us to present our project and spread awareness about AD on a different ground than our university while also getting to know the AFCM team more which paved the way for wonderful collaborations between us.
Our graduation ceremony
That day was very different for us, not only did we get to celebrate together finishing our college life, but we also got to present ourselves, the competition, and our project to the audience, which was very special to us this time. Here we stood in front of our professors, our families youngest to eldest, our friends, and our colleagues from all departments.
We talked about how we heard of the competition, what it was, the science it was based on (Synbio), our project, what was our target, and the achievements that we had done up to that date, the highlight of the day lies in the presence of all of our parents in this event, which allowed them to the see the result of our work till this day. A special thanks to our PI Prof.Dr. Faten Nour Eldin for providing us with that opportunity.
Attending AfricaOSH webinar
This was another chance to go beyond our local region in Egypt and get to know other African teammates, we talked about the team, Alzheimer’s disease, and our idea to treat AD in the presence of iGEM Africa members and other African teams.
miniGEM competition
One of our team members came up with an idea, why not get the students to live the true feeling of the iGEM competition? Why not do it in a more creative way instead of just giving a talk about the competition or synthetic biology? We didn’t want to limit this experience to our university students, so we opened applications for students of other universities from all over Egypt. Therefore, the idea of simulating iGEM and setting up a miniGEM came, but before that, we had to prepare ourselves and carefully plan how to give a true iGEM experience over a week.
event was divided into 4 days, with three workshops before the competition. The first day was for the creative team, the second one for the dry lab, the third one for the wet lab, and the fourth was our big day where all the teams will get to apply all that they learned in the past three days over their project idea.
You can choose the team that you want to see what is related to it by clicking on its name.
The day started with a funny sketch presenting young people that wanted to start a project in a general discipline not their field of science and then turning it into the field of biotech and synbio.
Following that was a session about how to build an idea and we reflected that on ourselves when we divided the team into subteams, how we chose each other, and how we reached our project ‘Zekra’ through a lot of filtration and voting based on literature and asking professors.
The second session was about synbio, and its importance, then a workshop. Each team had 20 minutes to turn a traditional solution for a problem into a synthetic-biology-based project, and then a member of each team presented their synbio solution in 2 minutes.
In a session about funding, we showed the iGEM cycle and talked in detail about the types of sponsors and what you can ask from each one, then we made a workshop about how to convince sponsors. We picked one from the attendees to try and convince the presenter who acted like a sponsor, it was a funny and useful experience because the presenter asked the questions that we had been asked before during our fundraising campaigns.
We ended the day with a session of an introduction to programming and why programmers are so important in every team. We then took a deeper look at the languages that you need to learn to decode your wiki (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, Bootstrap) giving a brief about them, methods to learn them, and what tools would help you. Finally, we gave a brief about GitLab as a new tool used in iGEM.
The concept of the day was to mimic a day in the life of an iGEM dry laber, illustrating why we need the dry lab in our work, and its main goals, referring to the central dogma and the levels that dry labers can work on.
We went further with a brief intro about Databases, like NCBI, BLAST, and UniProt, and how to search them followed by a workshop about where they got a file that had DNA sequences and their task was to blast them and know their names and functions.
Virtual cloning came next, their types, then talking about the genetic circuit of iGEM, and types of assembly like RCF10. This was also followed by a workshop on cloning to assemble parts according to iGEM guidelines using Benchling.
Protein modeling, some of its types (Homology and ab initio), how to do it, and what are the available software. We started by how to pick a model from RCSB (in PDB format), and how to compare different models’ quality. Next, how to do modeling if there was no suitable 3D structure available, we took the SWISS model server as an example and talked about its quality assessment. The workshop idea was to get the sequences they worked on in the previous sessions and predict their 3D structure by template-based modeling.
The last talk of the day was a brief about other duties that could be carried out by a dry laber, like docking, molecular dynamics simulation, and mathematical modeling.
The wet lab day started with an introduction about the wet lab, creatively, just like in your kitchen, in the lab you are the chief of your recipes, and you must prepare all things from regents, equipment, protocols, and tools before you start. The day begins with a brief explanation of some basics like negative and positive controls, dependent, and independent variables, clarifying the difference between internal and external validity of an experiment, and explaining different molecular techniques that can be used in synthetic biology.
Behind the scenes:
We were excited for the big day, the competition, but before this day there were a lot of preparations to make it resemble iGEM as much as possible, so we contacted the ambassadors of iGEM in Egypt as they had previous and current experiences as iGEM judges.
We are grateful for their efforts and how they didn't hesitate to help us as soon as we told them, we thank them for being a part of this event as judges. We held a meeting with them before the event and explained its idea and what outputs the applicants should come up with. They helped us set the medal criteria to fit the small competition and add criteria for the first winner. After our discussion, we sent the criteria to the competing teams for them to get ready.
You can find the judging criteria here
The big day came, and our schedule brought together the competing teams in addition to three teams participating in iGEM this year to give a presentation about their projects (Patras - Makerere - Patras Med). Our team also got the chance to present their project updates, and there was a talk by iGEM ambassador Erikan Baluku to start the event by talking about his experience in iGEM and the programs contained in iGEM (rephrase), and of course, our day cannot pass without a little entertainment, so we played a mini-game with the attendees which was really fun.
Our goal from the beginning was for these first-year students in our biotechnology department along with students from other universities all over Egypt to know about synthetic biology, to search for ideas of their own, apply synbio to them, and attempt to apply them in the Creative, Wet, and Dry lab levels. We had set a deadline for them to upload their work, as suggested by Mariam Ezz Al-Arab, they sent their presentations and documents of their completed work so that the judges can see them before the competition day, this way they would experience a little bit of the adrenaline rush that comes with the wiki freeze.
Each team gave a presentation of their project, and everyone was impressed with them because they had very little time, but managed to do amazing projects. Following the presentations, the judges had a little meeting to decide the winners.
We ended the day by announcing and celebrating the winners for their efforts, each participant got a certificate and a medal sticker, the little ceremony was really fun and we were really proud of them all.
We will not be biased and say the judges had a lot of fun too, but we will leave them to tell you that by themselves in the following videos:
Biotechnomatics Nile University event
We talked about what is iGEM, its history, the history of Egyptian teams in iGEM, what is synbio, what is our project, the obstacles to enrolling in the iGEM Competition, and a brief about Fundraising. The audience was university newcomers, undergraduate biotech students, other companies, and start-ups.
Biotech Superheroes
CEB is a biotechnology start-up whose CEO Dr. Ayman Saleh is a biotechnology graduate who is dedicated to spreading knowledge about the field to the Egyptian community through events, training, and social media as well.
The company organized an event for newcomers and undergraduate students to talk about biotechnology in Egypt and the future careers one can pursue.
We took part in the event through an open discussion with the audience about biotechnology competitions, specially iGEM, and there were a lot of questions.
Synbio comic for kiddos
Now it is time to go for our biggest challenge. It is known that if you aim to impact a generation, begin from scratch with the smallest age level, and so we formed this idea to fit the youngest age possible (>4 years old). Not only the concept but also the delivery method was all made fit for the kids to enlighten them with this powerful science.
The sketch is subdivided into four sections:
First, a glimpse of one adventurous kiddo called Noah who, like many other kids, wants to be a superhero. He got to know from his science teacher that there are small creatures that can be superheroes in their way.
He is so curious to settle for only this, so he began introducing those little bacteria and their life cycle.
Off to the part he anticipated the most, that bacteria can intake a spill bill called plasmid to make wonders.
Here comes the highlight, that the plasmid could be engineered and fully controlled, turning the microbacterium into a fireball worker in a macrobacterium cell factory, all of this through SynBio.
The storybook comes in two versions; a comic that could be read by young people, and a narrated sketch for very little kiddos to watch.
Street interview.
These interviews were another try to reach out to more people. The street interviews gave us a raw and clear idea about what people think about AD and how far they think it is dangerous or how to deal with it.
The interview was a light 3-4 minute talk asking random people- basically younger persons who agreed to film with us- about what do they know about AD, causes, treatment, how to deal with AD patients, and what they should do to prevent it.
The question and after we hear what they got we explain the point to them, give the facts about AD and let them follow us on social media to learn more about us, Alzheimer's, and iGEM.
