Cultivating Life Science and Synthetic Biology Community in the Mid-Atlantic to Northeast Region
We have been pleased to cultivate an ongoing partnership throughout the iGEM season with the College of William & Mary and Johns Hopkins University iGEM teams. We met monthly on Zoom as a large group, and smaller subteams continued to meet one to three times per week and chat regularly via GroupMe and Discord. Occasionally, JHU team members visited us at the Baltimore Underground Science Space. We collaborated around 3 areas:
Education was an area of particular emphasis for all three of our teams and became one of our major areas of ongoing collaboration. At our first meeting, we learned that William and Mary had an interest in creating educational video content, and both Hopkins and East Coast BioCrew had experience producing visual educational content from last year’s project -- our team had created an extended series of Instagram posts, and Hopkins had created a short educational video. Together, our three teams decided to build on this interest and past experience and combine our efforts to make a collection of educational videos.
As we worked together over several months to create informational videos to inform iGEM and the general public about topics relating to synthetic biology, the subteams discussed the project via Zoom meetings and messaging, and all contributed in the script, storyboarding, editing, and posting of the videos. We had extended discussions to brainstorm possible topics, identify our target audience, and come up with creative ways to increase dialogue with an audience that would be watching our videos asynchronously. The final videos were later posted on the YouTube channels of all three teams.
As a follow-up to this video work, we also partnered with both teams to gather user information/feedback through a survey. We wanted to assess how these videos were received and determine whether they were effectively reaching the target audiences. Through our collaborative efforts we were able to broaden the pool of respondents and reach both high school and undergraduate students.
Hardware was another area of shared interest and ongoing productive collaboration and discussion for us. Both our team and the Hopkins team had an interest in making sure our respective products were inexpensive in order to reach as broad a user base as possible. We shared our plans to create a PCB biosensor device, in which the genetic circuit would produce luciferin in the presence of PCBs. We would need a mechanism to detect the emitted light and a small computer to transmit the signal from the detector. We originally planned to use a Raspberry Pi for this purpose, but we learned from discussions with the Hopkins team about the benefits of an Arduino in this situation and how it would be better suited to our needs, as well as not subject to the current Raspberry Pi chip shortage. This allowed us to make key alterations to our hardware design.
Learning from and working with these two other teams to navigate the iGEM experience was an important part of our interactions. As teams from the same larger area but with different institutional backgrounds -- one long-standing collegiate team, one recently resurrected collegiate team, and one community lab-based high school team -- we were able to learn a lot from ongoing discussions of our experiences and hearing about how others approached them.
A shared challenge for our three teams was fundraising. Our team has had a lot of experience with this over the years, and we were able to share with the other teams some strategies that have worked for us to fund iGEM project work and Jamboree travel. Several of these were new to William and Mary and Hopkins, and they incorporated some of them. We are excited that all three of our teams will be able to be present in Paris.
Overall, this Partnership has contributed significantly to our iGEM project and has benefited all three of our teams. Through 5 months of ongoing collaborative work, we produced a collection of educational videos that we hope will engage and inform a wide audience about synthetic biology and general molecular biology techniques. Our discussions and collaboration around hardware devices enabled us to make key alterations to our hardware design. And our ongoing conversations about navigating iGEM gave us all insights into each other’s organizational approaches and allowed the other teams to learn about some different, effective fundraising strategies.