We focused on creating helpful resources, from fun educational projects and community events to easy-to-use tools and genetic designs, to make science easier to understand and inspire others to explore biology.
Our team created educational content, slide decks and hosted engaging events designed to support our iGEM team’s community outreach and engage young students with basic and relevant scientific topics. We also collaborated with the NIS Kazakhstan iGEM team to create a fairytale book, which teaches children about skin conditions, normalizing the occurrence of acne to help them feel more comfortable in their own skin. These contributions were motivated by the challenges we faced during our own project, and we wanted to make it easier for future teams to navigate similar hurdles.
The informational slide decks are an efficient, easy to follow tool that helped us explain complex subjects by breaking them down by topic. They also follow a slide deck format also allows us to use GIFs, videos, and graphics to present a visual representation of the topics. By incorporating various mediums into the presentations, we were able to make it simple for the students to understand concepts of DNA, the immune system, and inflammation better. Other educational material we developed includes the fairy tale storybook translated into multiple languages that makes its way to children to explain topics in a fun, engaging way.
Thank you to the NIS Kazakhstan team for introducing this collaboration opportunity.
Our team developed an open-source web-app tool that automatically detects and quantifies GFP expression (fluorescence) based on sample images of bacterial cells. We made this to address the challenge in biology of manually counting and measuring fluorescence of cells, which is time-consuming, subjective and inconsistent. The web-app we developed gives automated and reproducible quantification that any team may use for validation of their biosensor and expression analysis.
The modular code allows easy customization for different organisms, fluorescent proteins, or multi-channel imaging.
We designed our own gene constructs for detecting NO and H₂O₂ and producing GFP as a reporter. These genes weren’t submitted to the Registry, but we fully designed and modeled them, and planned experiments to test them as part of our project. They were a key part of our system and show the core work we did in engineering and planning the biosensor-response system. The PDFs below contain annotated sequences of the genes, plus the EcoR1 and PstI restriction sites we needed for the restriction digest. Other teams or researchers can use these designs as a reference for building similar biosensor systems or for educational purposes. They are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, so you’re welcome to adapt, share, or build on them with attribution.