Achievements

Team Accomplishments

Our 2013 iGEM team has worked hard to improve from 2012 iGEM team. This year our team has created a great project idea that has real-world benefits to society. We have fun working together to make this project successful and are looking forward to Boston! The majority of our team are juniors and are excited to return and be leaders for next year's team!

1. We are fortunate to have contact with a research mentor to guide and lead us through this process while Dr. Fenton is also being introduced to synthetic biology.


2. We have added two new parts relating to energy production to the registry for which few protein coding sequences exist. This link provides information showing the protein coding sequences. Now we have increased the available parts relating to energy production by 20%.


3. Our team has learned the protocol for site-directed mutagenesis and for PCRing prefix and suffix to parts.


4. This year we are extending the Hawaii team's work with cyanobacteria. We are using cyanobacteria as a chassis which is a unique one; most teams work with E. coli. Cyanobacteria is not even in the chassis registry, as shown in this link


5. One of our team members, Mason, has learned to use Tinker Cell to show the pathway of glycolysis to alkane production.

For the Judges

1. The wiki this year is more dynamic relative to last year's wiki. There are extensive code editing and features that are more appealing.


2. This year we used a modeling program called Tinker Cell. It shows a step-by-step pathway from glycolysis to alkane production.


3. The new parts that we added to the registry, Rabbit Muscle and Yeast PK, are natural. They are important in tackling possibly the world's most important problem which is clean sustainable energy.


4. Three of our team members helped teach a middle school camp again! This year the camp expanded to two sessions reaching to 50 kids. We taught them DNA extraction, bacterial transformation, micropipetting, gel electrophoresis and more.


5. To spread the word of our work, we have created a Twitter account, CAPS iGEM, and a Facebook page, CAPS iGEM. We have also created a Facebook group, High School iGEM 2013, for everyone to join. This Facebook group is designed to communicate, share, and socialize amongst all the other teams during the iGEM jamboree!


6. We also held two sessions (morning and afternoon) of a four day middle school bioscience camp for 50 students. It was themed "Life: an expedition". The camp was aimed at introducing students to the diversity of life and experience the latest technologies in molecular biology using state of the art equipment. Students had an opportunity to work with organisms inside and out in their native environment. Corinne, Dylan, Muriel and other CAPS alumni volunteered as helpers at the camp. We taught them about DNA, synthetic biology, and ecology through hands-on activities.