iGEM of UBC

Eric Finlay will be providing snacks for the talk that Shing will be presenting, titled “Rocking the Petabyte Age: Bioinformatics”, as an introduction to bioinformatics, a field with which he has gained considerable expertise in as an undergraduate. So come on down and get a feel for what bioinformatics is from one of your peers who’s an experienced hand at it!

Please RSVP on the Doodle!

• Date: 25 November 2009
• Time: 4:30PM to 5:30PM
• Venue: MSL226
• Speaker: Shing Hei Zhan
• Title: Rocking the Pentabyte Age: Bioinformatics
• Snacks: Eric Finlay

Hey everybody,

We were really glad to see the turnout for the Journal Club on Wednesday! The discussions we had were really great, and we hope to see more great papers, speakers, questions and ideas popping up!

Journal Club Director Volunteer Position

As we had mentioned at the JC meeting, we’re looking for a volunteer for the Journal Club Director position for the second term. Basically, the idea is that someone from the club would step up and start to run the Journal Club meetings, to ensure that it runs smoothly and successfully, and to come up with new ways to attract new people to the JC meetings. The time commitment is approx. 1-2 hours per week including attending JC.

Don’t worry if you haven’t had experience running any Journal Club series or previous exec experience (we certainly didn’t when we initiated JCs last year), as the execs will be available to support you and guide you along. If you have new ideas, we’re also there as resource people to help develop them with you. Also, you may want to think about this as a way of demonstrating your potential for being on next year’s team, as well as a place to develop organizational and communication skills. (It can go on your CV too… [hint.. hint..])

The selection process will be like this:

• Tell Eric Ma  your name/contact number/e-mail to ericmajinglong[at]gmail[dot]com
• Add in a brief background on your prior club experience if any(basically a list), with two sentences describing your two biggest contributions to that club
• Add in up to 3 sentences why you’d like to run the Journal Club.
• Send all 5 sentences of this by Wednesday, 2 December 2009. (Really, if Eric Ma sees it by the time he wakes up on Thursday, 3 December, that’s fine too.)
• The execs will review the applications together, and then make our decision on who will take up that position.
• Please see the attached JPEG file for more information!

Journal Club Discussions

As a part of the Journal Club, we’ve initiated a Discussions Wiki (http://discussions.ubcigem.com)  to help facilitate discussion of the paper after the weekly presentations. Instructions on how to operate the wiki can now be found on the front page of the Discussions wiki. We’d like to invite those who have spoken on their paper/topics to come up with a few discussion questions after the presentation, to help us continue the discussion of the paper, and to help us generate new ideas for the team. Also, as an exec team, we’d like to invite everybody to participate on the discussions page, to generate ideas that everybody can select from for next year’s team. As of now, Eric Finlay is the only non-exec who has participated in it, but we think everybody can do better than that.

JC Presenters for 25 Nov 2009

Shing-Hei Zhan has confirmed that he will be presenting a talk on Bioinformatics next week, and Eric Finlay is on for snacks. We will be e-mailing everybody with the details later on.

Here is link to our presentation made at iGEM Jamboree:

http://2009.igem.org/files/video/British_Columbia.mp4

Nov 25 4:30pm in MSL. Details will come soon!

The next JC meeting is going to be held on the 18th of November 2009. As per everybody’s request, we have changed the time to start at 4:30PM. Because of room bookings, we will be holding the meeting at MSL226 instead of MSL101. Please be punctual, as the MSL locks down at 5:00PM!

This coming JC, Amelia will be presenting a paper titled, Engineering the Salmonella type III secretion system to export spider silk monomers. Amelia is the iGEM of UBC Club’s secretary, and was one of the big driving forces behind the iGEM project last year, performing many assemblies and designing the bulk of our characterization experiments. (She was our “Queen of Cloning” on the team.) Amelia also co-presented the team’s poster at the OGI-IDT Synthetic Biology Symposia, as well as at this year’s iGEM Jamboree.

As Eric had mentioned at the previous JC meeting, he has started a wiki to generate discussion on the paper/topic presented that week. The goals for this are three-fold:

* Allow speakers to get constructive feedback on how they’re presenting
* Generate discussion of ideas for next year’s team
* Become familiar with wiki syntax, as iGEM focuses heavily on using wikis to report your work.

You can find the discussions page at: http://discussions.ubcigem.com/. This is a good place for you to demonstrate your passion for synthetic biology, as well as your potential (esp. in terms of ideas!) for being on the team next year as well. Please check out the discussion for the first talk that Eric gave, and be prepared to generate discussion for Amelia’s presentation!

So, in summary, here’s the details:

* Date: 18 November 2009
* Time: 4:30PM – 5:30PM (please be punctual!)
* Venue: MSL226
* Presenter: Amelia Hardjasa
o Paper: Engineering the Salmonella type III secretion system to export spider silk monomers
* Snacks: Eric Ma
* Links:
o Discussions: http://discussions.ubcigem.com/
o RSVP: http://www.doodle.com/dk8hegx4gx2ywbd2
o Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=203918505428&ref=mf

See you there!!

Our team has just came back from 2009 iGEM Jamboree. It was a fantastic event! We learned many cool project and ideas from other teams. Also, we were one of THE GOLD MEDAL WINNERS for our team’s hard work. Come out tomorrow to our JC meeting to learn more about our experience!

Our first big planned event is the “Journal Club” series, where we bring people together to discuss cunning edge scientific research in Synthetic Biology. This is also the place where next year’s project will be formed and evaluated. We have planned it to take place after we return from the Jamboree, specifically on 4th November 2009 at 5pm. For each session, there will be one presenter and one snack provider (free food – another reason you should come!). The meetings will run weekly. We’d like to invite you all to come and join us in this friendly and engaging environment to learn from each other about synthetic biology.