Education and Communication

Our team works hard to share the possibilities of synthetic biology with anyone curious. This starts with our new team members, and extends to students and professors at the university, as well as interested members of the Guelph community.

Team Training in Molecular Biology

Within the iGEM Guelph team, we number 38 students, with about ⅓ being Lab Members. Our Lab Members are often first year university students and have little to no experience in the lab, so we’ve developed a comprehensive and hands-on training program for them to develop their skills. By the end of August, our Lab Members come away with extensive knowledge of key laboratory techniques needed for synthetic biology, such as running gels, PCR, and general cloning processes.

We start by reviewing molecular biology basics with all our new team members. Everyone attends this review, regardless of which area of our team they’re on. We do this to bring everyone to a similar basic level of understanding of the science behind our work. This makes it much easier for our team members to communicate ideas with each other, and for them to share our work with stakeholders. We also do this to make sure that every member of our team can be involved in all aspects of our project, regardless of what their education background might be.

iGEM Guelph’s Molecular Biology Basics lesson

We then have our Lab Members do additional training in basic molecular biology techniques. Lab Members in groups of 3-5 are assigned to a Project Lead, a student who has usually been on the team for one or more years. The Project Leads take their Lab Members through two sets of training modules. The modules consist of videos, readings, and quiz questions for Lab Members to complete on their own time. Each technique is then discussed and the questions are taken up within their group. Other non-lab team members are invited to join these sessions, for their own interest.

Lab Members are now fully prepared for lab work! They can sign up for experiments being run by their Project Leads, where they will be guided through doing the various protocols themselves, and continue the learning process in a hands-on environment.

Module 1

Module 2

Events for New Students at the University of Guelph

This year, iGEM Guelph organized an orientation event for incoming first year students that was a massive success! We invited anyone interested to join us for a fun and simple genetics activity, where we isolated DNA from bananas and strawberries, and made keychains out of them. Over 40 students attended the event!

At our event, the team had the opportunity to talk to students about synthetic biology, and introduce them to what it’s like being a part of iGEM Guelph. We gave a tour of the lab and talked about what sort of work we do. Attendees had lots of questions about how genetic engineering is done, what kind of experiments and tests we do to work with something we can’t even see, and how we came up with our project idea.

Since most of the attendees were just starting their first year of university, they had questions for our team about what to expect from their classes and programs of study. We had the amazing opportunity to meet with, teach and advise incoming students, and bring people together through our shared curiosity. Many of our team members also met students who were just starting in the same programs as them, and were able to give advice and reassurance about what to expect from their degree. Lots of phone numbers and instagram handles were exchanged!
Following our orientation week event, iGEM Guelph hosted a table at the University of Guelph club fair, and spoke with many students about our team, our research, and synthetic biology in general. Many students from the orientation event came to visit us, and we had the chance to speak with well over 100 students, professors, and community members about our team and the work we do.

Synbio Seminars

Because of how popular our orientation week and club day events were, the team decided to run a synthetic biology seminar series for students on campus, that is geared to all levels of scientific knowledge, and designed to cultivate discussion surrounding the possibilities, science, and ethics of synthetic biology.

The seminars are run on campus, and so far we have successfully completed the first in what we hope to make a series of discussion-based seminars for students, professors, and community members alike! Because of popularity, we are running each seminar twice to give everyone interested ample opportunity to attend.

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