Teachtheteachers

Teach the Teachers 2008 Stata Center, MIT, May 3, 2008

9:00 am -- Welcome and Introduction by Randy Rettberg

Brief discussion about the philosophy of iGEM - building an engineering discipline around standardized parts.

Sponsors

The MathWorks is providing free software to iGEM teams.

GeneArt is provinding low-cost DNA synthesis to iGEM teams.

Movies iGEM Cartoon Movie Movie about the 2006 iGEM Slovenian team (where can this be found?) The iGEM 2007 Dance movie

iGEM Websites Main iGEM website New Parts Registry site -- active in about 1 week Overview of the schedule for the day

9:30 am Synthetic Biology based on Parts -- Tom Knight Abstraction and Design of Simple Biological Systems This is very similar to his talk presented at SB3.0 in Zurich, available here at the bottom of the page.

Some of the basic concepts discussed here are abstraction, modularity, standardization, isolation (separation of concerns), and flexibility. More information about the standardization of parts (and some legal issues around this) is available at [http://www.biobricks.org www. biobricks.org]. Dr. Knight stressed the importance of iGEM teams using the existing parts, using the standardized assembly techniques, and becoming contributors to the parts registry. This year's distribution contains more than 2000 parts, compared to 5 in 2001. For this growth to continue, teams must continue to contribute their new parts to the registry.

10:00 am -- Jason Kelly -- Standard Measurement Kit for BioBrick Promoters (PoPS-out devices) (The slides will be at http://partsregistry/measurement when the site is live) Jason explains how to measure the PoPs of promoters and compare it to a reference standard.

More information here and here.

10:30 am -- Reshma Shetty Building BioBrick vectors from BioBrick parts Everything you need to know can be found in their Journal of Biological Engineering article, found here. (doi:10.1186/1754-1611-2-5). Also slides from the talk are [[Media:ReshmaShettyEngineeringBioBrickVectors.pdf|available]] (pdf download).

10:45 am -- Randy Rettberg -- Overview of the iGEM 2008 Wiki

Note that a team page on the official iGEM wiki is required for each team. This is the information that will be used by the judges. Teams are welcome to maintain their own wikis, but the project information must be uploaded to the official iGEM wiki before judging starts. This ensures that judges have access to the material and also that information will be preserved for the benefit of teams in future competitions.

12:00 noon -- Lunch and team introductions The list of registered teams can be found here.

1:15 pm -- Mathworks Introduction MathWorks is again a sponsor of iGEM. Click here for software and training! Contact is Kristen Zannella for information or feedback kzannella(at)mathworks(period)com

1:30 pm -- Meagan Lizarazo, Overview of Registry tools, BioBrick formats See technical formats for overview of the various standards.

See this page for a set of tutorials and other info to help you use the registry tools effectively. The tutorial during the workshop largely followed the "Team Experience Tutorial".

2:45 pm -- Meagan Lizarazo, Overview of 2008 DNA distribution This year the DNA has been fully QC'd and is spotted onto filter sheets that will be sent out in a binder. Information about the 2008 DNA can be found here. All the information about each part on each "plate" can be found here.

3:30 pm -- Randy Rettberg, Overview of Team Requirements and how iGEM will operate

4:00 pm -- Drew Endy -- Judging, Awards, and Biosafety See here for draft information on awards and here for information on how iGEM will be judged. NOTE: This is all draft and open for discussion! Email Drew!

There is also a biosafety requirement as part of the iGEM team presentations now -- part of bridging the generational gap between younger and older scientists, raising awareness, and sharing best practices.