Communication
First Ever Manitoban iGEM Team !
This is the very first year that Prairie iGEM hosted an official iGEM team! So of course, we wanted the Manitoban synthetic biology community to be as excited as we were. We contacted as many different people as we could. This included academic institutions, private industry and high schools. We also reached out to other iGEM teams in Canada such as Lethbridge High School and internationally such as with UNILausanne from Switzerland.
Post-Secondary
Our competition name is team UManitoba in recognition of the University of Manitoba’s outstanding support, they are our base of operations and largest sponsor. Internally we are Praire iGEM and our goal is to serve as a hub for synthetic biology enthusiasts in Manitoba. We have worked with the amazing staff at the faculty of science to give Prairie iGEM social media a signal boost, with events such as Instagram takeovers. We have also been featured in the internal newsletter.
The University of Winnipeg is the second-largest in Manitoba located in downtown Winnipeg. Currently, Antonella Abbott represents the University of Winnipeg. We have been in contact with the UofW at events such as Science in the City. They have expressed interest in iGEM and synthetic biology in general. These are exciting times for Manitobans interested in synthetic biology!
Red River College Polytechnic is a Technical and Trades College in Manitoba that trains many of the province’s laboratory technicians in the fields of medicine, and chemistry with a recent focus on biotechnology. We have a correspondence with Mr. Curtis Aab, one of the biotechnology coordinators. Upon our return, we will be presenting iGEM to the biotechnology students. We hope to establish a formal partnership by iGEM 2023.
When someone talks about the Canadian “Prairies” they are generally referring to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Alberta was the first to field iGEM team and now Manitoba is also representing. From our conversations at Science in the City (Hosted by BAM and the University of Winnipeg) it seems like Saskatchewan may be considering iGEM 2023. They asked us if we would be willing to share our experience starting up an iGEM team, and of course, we agreed.
Industry
The Biosciences Association of Manitoba is a non-profit whose mission statement is “To enable commercial success for Manitoba’s bioscience companies by acting as a catalyst for innovation, by expanding the sector’s skills and workforce development, and by leading with one unified voice to create local and global engagement.”
We were lucky enough to have a chance to speak with the BAM president Kim Kline. We have had the pleasure of attending two events hosted by BAM. By making ourselves part of the BAM network we have been able to present iGEM to the local biotechnology scene.
We were invited to the BAM Funding Day event where we had a chance to pitch ZebraZap and iGEM in general to potential investors. We had a great time and met too many people to list here. We even managed to pick up a few sponsors, such as research Manitoba.
The iGEM innitative is still new in Manitoba. We were invited to share our project and the resutls at the Science in the City event at the University of Winnipeg. Here we have Cindy Atayan representing us at the event.
We were also fortunate enough to meet with some representatives from Baxter Biopharma.
High Shcool
To help in the development of the synthetic biology community in Manitoba, our team provided presentations on iGEM and synthetic biology to interested grade 12 chemistry and biology classes at various high schools. We worked closely with Mr. Euan Burton, a high school biology teacher at St. Paul’s High School, to determine how we could effectively supplement the current biology curriculum. Mr. Euan Burton has started a synthetic biology club at St Paul’s High School and is interested in starting a high school iGEM team in the future. Our material focused on an introduction to the central dogma of molecular biology and how its components and processes are the toolbox of synthetic biology. We then presented examples of various past iGEM projects and our current project to demonstrate how interdisciplinary the field is and the wide range of possibilities when it comes to synthetic biology, followed by a Q&A session. We reached out to many high schools in Winnipeg and gave presentations at Linden Christian School, Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute and St. Paul’s High School.
Synthetic Biology Tutorials
In general, students were really excited by what we had to show them and wanted to know if they could do it themselves. Thanks to the OpenMTA licence of the iGEM distribution we are able to offer a nicely curated set of DNA, the only limit really is creativity then. As a first step, our team worked on developing bacterial transformation kits to supplement the current grade 12 biology curriculum. Our aim was to provide a fun and accessible introductory activity to encourage classes to teach their students about synthetic biology in a hands-on manner.
In Manitoba, the majority of grade 12 biology classes do not learn about synthetic biology until the end of the semester, so the kits are to be provided in January. The bacterial transformation is to be done in groups of two and the students will be transforming varying plasmids that express a coloured protein from the free genes open reporters kit into DH5a E. coli cells, therefore resulting in colourful colonies.