From 2007.igem.org

Now, the iGEM competition of this year is almost finished and we think that could be a good idea to try to evaluate more or less the evolution of our iGEM team. Maybe it could be of interest for people that are thinking on participating in next years competition or could be useful to avoid that other teams makes the same mistakes as us.

This year we took the decision of making a reduced team in such a way that all the people in the team had a clear responsability and role. When the team was formed several general talks were planned in orther to put the proper required background in all the students. Some of this talks were given by the team of professors and advisors, but some of them also by the students. From the educational point of view and as a consequence of the Spanish educational system which is quite encapsulated in areas, this is quite good experience because it allows the interaction of students of different disciplines working in group and they learn to comunicate between them.

The main target of all this formation period was to reach a point in july in which the students were able to design their project and to develop it in a more or less autonomous way. At this point the professors and advisors only should participate giving some advices and support if it is required. Nevertheless, the students should keep in mind one fundamental thing, the project should be simple enough to be finished previously to the jamboree, so they should be careful in that sense, because the lab work gives a lot of surprises.

In that way, we consider that they solve these limitations in a quite smart way as they thought the project as a modular one that they could complicate more and more according the evolution of the lab work.

Although the in silico work was performed properly by the student without requiring to much help from the professors or advisor team. The experimental work had a lot of problems, and at least at this moment, according the formation of our students, is quite difficult to think that it could be developed without the help of a quite qualificated lab people.

All the team of Professors and advisors.

Students Valoration of the experience

• Arnau(Background in Biology)
• Hicela(Background in Biology)
• Olga(Background in Biology)
• Raul(Background in Biology)
• Pablo(Background in Chemistry)
• Debasish(Background in Chemical Engineering)
• Javi(Background in Physics)