Expanding Screen-Sprinting
By developing this at-scale screening project to involve our wetlab students, and building project-based trainings for our computational students, we plan to make these resources more accessible and available to our organization members and campus at large. For the screening project, a series of pre-made walkthrough videos alongside the easy-to-use lab sheets make the complicated task of coordinating many students in a wet lab environment very streamlined; we are now actively working on ways to expand this experience with other campuses, community colleges, and high schools. For the computational trainings, notebooks featured introductions to concepts, background readings, and introductory exercises that collectively served as methods to onboard new students onto their projects; we’ve now made these notebooks available via our GitHub, available for anyone to learn from. Additionally, in November, members of the computational team taught an introductory course on computational biology to high school students with modified components of these training notebooks.
Ongoing progress from our projects is presented through the semester at our general, all-hands meetings; these are venues for our project teams to share what they have been working on, recent accomplishments and setbacks, and questions or challenges that they want to seek feedback on. Results from the Screen-Sprinting project, including updates on wetlab sequencing and fluorescence scores were shared at the second all-hands meeting.
Our semesters conclude with the Cal Undergraduate Bioengineering Symposium (CUBS), where our students on iGEM teams get to develop and present posters and lightning talks to an audience of graduate students, professors, and other scientists on campus.
