iGEM of UBC

Hey everybody,

The next JC meeting is going to be held on the 20th of January 2010. The meeting will be back in our regular room (MSL 101) at our regular time (4:30).

This coming JC, Eric Ma will be presenting a paper titled, Automated design of synthetic ribosome binding sites to control protein expression.

So, in summary, here’s the details:

• Date: 20 January 2010
• Time: 4:30PM – 5:30PM (please be punctual!)
• Venue: MSL101
• Links:
  • Discussions: http://discussions.ubcigem.com/
  • RSVP: http://www.doodle.com/m5etb9w7xubpevvk
  • Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/#/event.php?eid=257780390757&index=1

See you there!!

Many thanks,
2010 iGEM of UBC Journal Club Director

We’d like to let everybody know about our new Journal Club Director, Eric Finlay. Eric Finlay is an Engineering Physics student currently in his 2nd year at UBC, and has taken an interest in synthetic biology very recently. As an exec, we’re really excited to have him on board to work with us to make the club an even better organization!

The next JC meeting is going to be held on the 13th of January 2010. Due to a scheduling conflict, the meeting will start at 5:00pm rather than 4:30pm. Because of room bookings, we will be holding the meeting at MSL237 instead of MSL101. Please be punctual, as the MSL locks down at 5:00PM!

This coming JC, Hank Yu will be presenting a paper titled, Antimicrobial activities of commercial nanoparticles against an
environmental soil microbe, Pseudomonas putida KT2440.

So, in summary, here’s the details:

• Date: 13 January 2010
• Time: 5:00PM – 5:30PM (please be punctual!)
• Venue: MSL237

Links:

• Discussions: http://discussions.ubcigem.com/
• RSVP: http://www.doodle.com/sk7itagii24r6ar2
• Facebook Event: http://www.facebook.com/#/event.php?eid=283069274504&index=1

See you there!!

The next Journal Club Meeting is this Wednesday (2nd December 2009), 4:30PM. It will be held in room 101 at the Michael Smith Laboratories (next to the bookstore). The “Journal Club” series bring people together to discuss cutting-edge scientific research in Synthetic Biology. This is also the place where next year’s project will be formed and evaluated. For this week, Shing Hei Zhan will be providing snacks, and Charles will be presenting a talk titled “BioBytes: The Next Generation”, which is a talk on the 2009 University of Alberta’s iGEM Team Project, which also won the “Best Foundational Advance” award, ahead of team Heidelberg (they were the runners-up in the entire competition), who also competed in the same category.

Charles was one of the founding team members of the 2009 iGEM Team. He has a wealth of scientific education behind him, having graduated with two Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and in Biotechnology. He also works as a Bioinformatician at the Hallam Lab in the Life Sciences Centre, and was recently named as one of the authors in a paper published in Science. (Just so you know, Science is on of the biggest journals to publish in!)

Essential information:

* Date: 2 December 2009
* Time: 4:30PM to 5:30PM
* Venue: MSL101
* Speaker: Charles Howes
* Talk Title: BioBytes: The Next Generation
* Snacks: Shing Hei Zhan

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.

We now have two groups running:

ubc-igem@googlegroups.com: this is a group for our members.

ubc-igem-interest@googlegroups.com: this is a group dedicated who those who are interested in iGEM and synthetic biology at UBC.

If you have not received an invitation to join and you would like to stay in touch with us, please sign up for the group or alternatively email ubcigem@gmail.com your email address.

Club days are this week! Here are the time you can come and check out our booth:

Wed Sept 23: 12-4

Thurs Sept 24: 10-5

Fri Sept 25: 12-2

We will be located in the South Lounge of the SUB, near where the Starbucks is. Come and join us!