Berkeley Engineering Blogs

It’s 3:15 pm Eastern time, and our presentation is scheduled to start in 45 minutes.  We have spent the day watching other presentations and getting a feel for what other teams have been doing.  Presenting late in the day is a little nerve-wracking.  

I have also been interviewing people about their opinions on synthetic biology, its attachment to iGEM, and friction between the open source philosophies and the realities of the technicalities of doing the research and the needs of the researchers for characterized systems, parts, and devices.

Here is a pictoral depiction of our day so far:

Beautiful Stada Center!!

Searching, searching for presentations.

Last minute practice, this time with hard hats.

JAMBOREE DAY ONE!

Free coffee delivered, opening remarks spoken, and first teams speaking–the iGEM competition is off to its start.  The rooms for the teams to present are too small for the crowds who want to see them, so there are many overflow areas for others to see them–although unfortunately there are usually seven teams speaking at once, so we’ll have to wait to watch the filmed footage (posted on youtube?) to see everyone who is presenting here today.

Here’s a little distraction, though, in the form of Clonebots viral marketing…

Jamboree–Day Zero.

Tomorrow’s the big day, and today has been spent re-calibrating and going over the presentation and Q&A session that we’ll have at 4:00 tomorrow afternoon.  

We were schooled on proper body language and comportment rules for the presentation.  

Molly’s cutting up some Clonebots stickers for attachment to our construction hats and other important sticker-applied areas.

Clonebots:  a new example of viral marketing.

Terry teaches us the importance of thinking like Batman while presenting to a room of scientists.

…while Bing, Madhvi, Christie, and I make last minute changes on our powerpoint presentation. Â

Thursday night found us sitting around in the Oakland Airport, playing sudoku and utilizing precious free wifi before setting off for a night flight to Boston.  We have spent the week finalizing our presentation and our poster, so everyone is a bit exhausted at the beginning of the journey.

Action shot of Bing in the airport.  Bam!

Dramatic cell phone shot.

No action or drama here.  Just sudoku.  The adventure begins!

Our presentations (those of the Wet Lab and the Computational Team) are both on Saturday, and we have all of Friday to practice the presentations over and over, to make sure that they are informative, but captivating, and most of all that we keep them within the 20 minute time limit…  There will be a question and answer session after the presentation, and this is a new concept to many of us, so Terry and Chris will be coaching us on how to reach into the resources of the work we have been doing to answer questions effectively and interestingly. 

We came into the predawn world of drizzly Boston at 5:30 am, surprisingly not too grumpy and even a bit cheery. We were, however, in great need of some shut-eye to get rid of that red-eye to face the rest of the day full of practice presentations.    

You can feel how extreme the predawn Boston was with the blurriness of this picture.

Jamboree, here we come!  

Here, more than a month after “lysophonix” was deemed unrealistic for completion in time for the iGEM competition, we find the team has gathered together the research completed and has decided to change the focus of the project. A biologically encoded lysis device is still in operation in the team’s new project, coined “Clonebots,” but it now focuses more precisely on the in vivo assembly of parts (which is now regularly referred to as the “manufacture of parts” within the lab) and the easy accessibility of those parts (or product).  

The sound promoters were found to be faulty, which thus led the team to reformat their project for the competition. This is interesting in light of Drew Endy’s past comments that the only way synthetic biology will work and be understood is through the investigation and analysis, on the part of the scientists themselves, of experiments that failed or did not go to plan and the presentation of that analysis to others conducting synthetic biology research. iGEM would seem a perfect place for such presentation of the analysis of complexities involved in attempts and re-attempts to get biological systems to produce what we want them to produce, but it would seem that the environment and situation of the competition could restrict positive inquiry in “failures” as it simultaneously tries to support positive inquiry through “successes.” At the heart of the synthetic biology being done by countless teams across the globe for iGEM is the desire to be recognized at the Jamboree in November–and focusing a project’s presentation on why it did not work according to plan could realistically be an obstacle of access to such recognition. 

But how frequently do scientific experiments go completely to plan?  Synthetic biology focuses its efforts, at least given some of its self-description, on the production of “novel systems,” and biology is an unquestionably largely unknown frontier (though, arguably, less unknown in relation to E. coli or yeast). Unexpected outcomes would appear to be the norm with such a set of parameters. And wouldn’t understanding how to troubleshoot a biological system be the basic requirement for a mapping of electrical engineering onto biology or for engineering biological systems?