Captain's Log #0

Written by Zach Mueller

Hi there! I’m Zach, the Principal Investigator for the SoundBio iGEM team and a co-founder of the SoundBio Lab where the high schoolers are conducting their research. This first Lab Note is meant to provide background on our team as well as introduce the idea of the Captain’s Log our team will maintain throughout our project and will publish to Experiment.

Background

Our team started in 2017 when a few enthusiastic high schoolers wanted to start an iGEM team to open opportunities to curious minded high schoolers across Seattle. They weren’t able to convince any individual high school to host the full team because they recruited students from several schools. After they were worried they wouldn’t have a space to operate in, they heard that SoundBio Lab was opening its community biology lab in March of that year. Things quickly fell into place after a couple conversations and the SoundBio iGEM team was formed. The team earned Bronze medals in both of its first two years and is hopeful for even better results this year. Entering our third iGEM season, we have over 40 students from 15 different high schools across the Greater Seattle Area, plus a few homeschooled students. iGEM provides an exceptional opportunity for the students to obtain hands-on lab experience by building a solution to a real world problem using the tools of synthetic biology.

Captain’s Log

During our campaign and throughout our research, we will leverage Experiment’s Lab Notes to publish a Captain’s Log. Inspired by an idea from Cindy Wu, who drew inspiration from Star Trek, the Captain's Log is a weekly log written for ourselves, for "future captains," and for our stakeholders. It is primarily intended to help ourselves and others learn from our progress: the mistakes we make, the successes we achieve, and what ideas we try vs which we forgo due to time or other constraints. It is a starting point for future scientists to understand our project's origins, the paths we explored, and where things might go next. These Captain's Logs are not meant to address the reproducibility of our work. Instead, they focus on the what and why of things we try and how our results along the way influence our next steps. Content related to reproducibility—detailed protocols, lab notebooks, and data—are shared via our team's wiki on the iGEM website. We will share links to our wiki with those more specific details of our work as the wiki is updated, which mostly occurs near the end of the iGEM season in the fall.

Our iGEM team operates with many subteams that focus on different aspects of the iGEM competition. Each subteam has one or two Student Leads who oversee the direction of their subteam to ensure they meet their milestones and collaborate effectively with other subteams. These Leads will each write weekly Captain's Logs for their area. These Logs will be compiled into a team-wide Captain's Log and published as a Lab Note on Experiment. While the content will vary by subteam, all will follow the theme of describing what we did and did not try and why, what the results helped us learn, and how that influenced what we’re doing next.

Feedback

While these logs are intended as updates on our team’s progress, we also encourage you, as supporters of our research, to join in the conversation. If you have questions about specific parts of any post, feel free to jump right in and ask! Our high school members are passionate about biology and love to help others understand even the most deeply technical details. Or if our updates spark an interesting idea or research question that could be relevant for us to explore, please share! Our team likes to work closely with our stakeholders and our community to guide the direction of our project to ensure our solution will have buy-in from those who might end up using it.

Backers Only Lab Notes

To keep with the spirit of supporting more open and accessible science, all Captain's Log posts will be publicly viewable upon publishing. However, we also want to give our backers—those that chip in to support us financially—extra insight into our team's personality, the day-to-day life of being a young scientist, and any additional content that we produce as a team. These may come in a variety of forms. We might post lab bloopers, aka any particularly funny moments in our lab work. Some students might record updates in vlog style and share those with backers. Or we might share any design content with our backers prior to sharing them with their intended audience. Backers will also be the first to see recordings of our presentation at the Giant Jamboree as well as digital versions of our poster.

I look forward to another fun year of iGEM at SoundBio and hope you follow along in our journey!