The UBC iGEM 2012 team is hosted at Dr. Hallam’s lab in the UBC Life Sciences Institute.

For more details on our blazing success at the 2011 iGEM competitions, check out our 2011 team website!

The 2011 UBC iGEM team won a Gold Medal, a special award for Best Model Americas, and advanced to the World Championship!

We featured in UBC news by the Faculty of Applied Science (articles here and here) and Faculty of Science UBC Science Connect (newsletter here)!

Please find a summary of how to apply to the UBC iGEM 2011 team attached.  Also included is a breakdown of the important dates involved with team formation.

In your application, please include:

a) Your ranking of where you feel you would be the best fit, in terms of the 3 pillars (wet lab, modeling and human practices)
b) Your ranking of interest in the 3 pillars (no-one will be exclusively working on one skill set)
c) A summary of your involvement in iGEM so far (meeting attendance etc.)

If you want to be on the UBC iGEM 2011 team you MUST submit your application to Dr. Lagally (lagally@msl.ubc.ca) by March 18th at 5pm.

For those of you who weren’t able to make it to the past couple club meetings, we had presentations from Dr. Hieter, Dr. Madden and Dr. Beatty.

Dr. Madden (link: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~jmadden/) and Dr. Beatty (link: http://www.microbiology.ubc.ca/beatty) presented their joint research project, the goal of which is to use photosynthetic reaction centres to produce biophotovoltaic devices.  This project is a combination of Electrical Engineering, Physics and Microbiology and could easily fit into the the 3 main pillars of an iGEM project (wet lab, modeling and human practices).

Dr. Hieter (link: http://www.msl.ubc.ca/faculty/hieter) presented his lab’s work on using yeast cells to model human chromosome maintenance which is heavily implicated in causing cancer.  This area of research could easily encompass multiple iGEM projects and there should be no issues finding an area where iGEM and synthetic biology would be applicable.

Good luck!

Feel free to email us at ubcigem@gmail.com should you have any questions or concerns.

1. First meeting of the year.
Our first club meeting of the year will be on Wednesday January 19th, 2011, from 5-6pm, in Michael Smith Laboratories, room 101.
Michael Smith Laboratories is to the left of the book store.

2. Bring your friends!
If you have any friends who are interested – whether they be in Arts, Commerce, Engineering, Music, etc. feel free to bring them along. The more the merrier! Having a diverse team is definitely essential to having a more complete and successful project.

3. Questions?
E-mail us at ubcigem@gmail.com

We hope to see you all soon!

Applications to become a team member for UBC iGEM 2011 will launch late February/early March due to administrative technicalities.

Similar to last year, we will be asking all potential applicants to submit their resume and unofficial transcript to ubcigem@gmail.com. Further, we will be conducting interviews over a 2-week time frame in order to accommodate everyone. A sign up sheet will be made available once certain technicalities get resolved on our end.

We apologize for the inconvenience as we know many of you are very enthusiastic and cannot wait to begin formulating project ideas! We will, of course, continue to host club meetings. Our next one will be some time in the next week or so. If interested, please fill out this doodle: http://www.doodle.com/tvqdmvcad6gbv67a by this Sunday (9th) and we will try to accommodate as many people as we can!

We look forward to meeting you!

If you have any questions at any time, always feel free to e-mail us at ubcigem@gmail.com

1. Parts Registry: http://partsregistry.org/ – Get yourself familiarized with the concept of “biological parts” and their functions, as well as the core resource of the iGEM competition.
2. 2010 iGEM Website: http://2010.igem.org/
3. 2009 iGEM Website: http://2009.igem.org/

Check out the iGEM websites to get a feel for the whole competition, as well as to browse through what each team has attempted throughout the competition.

If you’re feeling a bit more academic, you could also check out the following two review articles:

1. “Synthetic biology: applications come of age” Kahlil and Collins, 2010, Nature Rev. Genetics
2. “Foundations for synthetic biology” Endy, 2005, Nature