The (dream) teams participating in iGEM 2021
Gothenburg iGEM team
Greetings from Gothenburg!
We are a team consisting of 8 students with various backgrounds who are all converging on the same goal; to learn and gain experience in the field of synthetic biology.
Being a team with various backgrounds have a lot of advantages, especially in competitions such as iGEM where many different tasks need to be done. For our main project – where we attempt at creating a programmable yeast factory for fatty acid production – we require both theoretical and practical expertise in synthetic biology to design a system to accomplish this and then also to create it in the lab. We aim to strengthen our main project by simulation, requiring expertise in programming and we build our own website from scratch, needing a different type of programming skill. We made a promotion video for our project, requiring video editing and sound control skills. We hosted a conference needing lots of planning and organising skills. And for all this we also have been in need of great funding, requiring great communication and presenting skills as well as skills for finding potential business partners or sponsors.
The last sentence leads us into what actually makes this possible to accomplish, to what is required but often assumed to exist until proven otherwise; communication. Not only do we need to have great communication within the group to be able to work and help each other coming from different backgrounds and all, but we also need it to reach out towards companies, sponsors and most importantly to the general public. Basically, we wish to answer the question “how to make people interested in- and understand what we do?”. We need to take complex ideas often portrayed in academically written texts full of buzzwords and complex sentences and make them readable, understandable and interesting for everyone.
This is exactly what we and our friends from iGEM Lausanne aim to do with this blog! We wish to unpackage complex ideas and show how it is used, and how it can be used in the most readable, understandable and interesting way possible. We hope you enjoy what is being written and that it sparks interest in you as a reader!
Best wishes,
iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg 2021
The (dream) teams participating in iGEM 2020
Gothenburg iGEM team
Greetings from Gothenburg!
We are a team consisting of 10 young students who are all converging on the same goal; to learn and gain experience in the field of synthetic biology.
At the time of writing, we’ve just recently established a project idea, but the sailing was not as smooth as we initially may have thought. Bumps were hit, obstacles were traversed and many cups of coffee were consumed. As a team we’ve formulated and discussed many ideas, both amongst ourselves and together with our supervisors – they themselves being former iGEM-competitors – in order to come up with a project that we are really passionate about. A xenobiotic degradation of the textile fiber Spandex, through the incorporation of a protein array into E. Coli. In fact, the estimates show that circa 85% of textile waste in the U.S ends up in landfills. Evidently, this is an extremely inefficient model both environmentally and economically. As such, we feel that there is a lot we can improve on, and by doing our project, we hope that we will contribute to a better and more sustainable future.
Perhaps, while reading this introductory post, you were met with concepts, words or phrases that you’ve never seen before. It’s not a stretch to think of the word xenobiotic as uncommon, but yet, it describes one part of our project: the degradation of something of non-biological origin. The word is often used to describe such specific and complex terms is Jargon. In the correct context, say, in a scientific publication, jargon serves as a way for scientists to express themselves with specific and exact meaning – minimizing the risk for confusion. In this case, jargon is great. But on the flip side, scientific jargon also creates a barrier for people outside of the scientific community looking to learn more about a subject. To put it like this; Scientific jargon is an effective gatekeeper for newcomers, creating a content barrier that discourages readers without a scientific background.
This is what we, together with our co-writers and friends at iGEM Lausanne, aim to change with this blog – to make science more accessible by unraveling the mysteries of those hard-to-read papers into easy articles with an understandable language.
Best wishes,
iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg 2020
Lausanne iGEM team (UNIL)
Hey there you curious people!
Coming from all kinds of countries, backgrounds and personal experiences we are reaching out to you!
We are a team of 12 passionate people who assembled together in Lausanne forming the wonderful iGEM team. As first timers in the “international Genetically Engineered Machine” competition, we are more than eager to learn new things, discover our hidden talents, and enjoy every aspect of this project.
The idea for our project came into this world through dozens of articles, countless discussions, mind-bending scientific terminology and creative ways of overcoming our limitations. Recently, after weeks of brainstorming, we made the big decision. We aim to develop bacteria with an oscillatory system that would administer a colorectal cancer (CRC) treatment. What motivates us to tackle this problem is finding a more efficient way to cure CRC and showing the great potential of gut microbiota.
This experience showed us that keeping up with life science can be quite a challenge even if you are a keen-on-the-subject biology student. Together with the iGEM Chalmers-Gothenburg 2020 team we would like this blog to be a “buffer” making biology more understandable. We wish to share with you amazing facts about the living (and not-so-much-living) organisms, interactions among them, where from and how all life (probably) came to be, the role of the scientific community and how it all influences our society. Because after all, biology is the ultimate connection between all of us!
Wish us luck!
iGEM bloggers 2020 from University of Lausanne