SPONSORED WALK!

Last Wednesday, 7 of our team members took part of our sponsored walk from Leicester to Market Harborough.

The image shows our route by the canal. We started walking from the University of Leicester campus at 9.30am and we reached the edge of Market Harborough at 9.30pm. It took us 12 hours to walk 22.4 miles!
The sponsored walk raised almost 400 pounds! And we would like to extend a big thank you to all of our sponsors, friends and family that donated!

The walk itself was an adventure. There were uncountable amount of blisters, heat and midday sun, and getting lost at the end of our walk. Nonetheless, we made it to Market Harborough and everybody had a great time!

We also had multiple stops along the way, since we were carrying backpacks of food with lunch and snacks and in addition to that we had a couple of pub stops. The nature and canal itself were beautiful. Just as we were walking into Market Harborough, we witnessed an amazing sunset! And it is all captured on photos.

Furthermore, we were asked by the iGEM team of the Norwich Research Park from University of East Anglia to send in soil samples. Dr. Badge was carrying all the necessary equipment and we have quite a number of samples collected.

Now on to the photo evidence of our 22 mile walk.

              The team (minus Dr. Badge taking the photo) at the beginning of our walk by the canal.

Happy team (somewhere near the 5mile point)!

 A lot of bridges with interesting names along the way.

  Dr. Badge collecting soil samples by the canal.

12 miles and counting! From left to right: Dr. Badge, Dupsy, David, Brett and Clara.

David taking a break from the walk and manning the lock gate.

Arriving into Foxton Locks, our 20 mile marker! The team was so tired that our stop lasted an hour. During which we had a nice pub meal and rest, before continuing on with the last 2,5 miles.

Last few miles left, sky is turning pink.

Walking into Market Harborough, can't conceal the excitment! 

And the official arrival to Market Harborough!

The team from left to right: Clara, David, Quezia, Dr. Badge, Tanvi, Dupsy, Brett, Chris.

Young Synthetic Biologists with the UK iGEM teams

Over the weekend of Friday the 12^th of July, some members of the team attended the Young Synthetic Biologists (YSB) conference at the Wellcome Trust and UCL. This provided us with an opportunity to not only represent our university but also interact with members of other iGEM UK teams.

Each team gave a brief presentation about their project and also had posters with extra information. The projects were all very innovative and exciting and some teams even collaborated with each other before the end of the programme.

Of course, people loved our Citizen Science Kits (CSE) and even requested to plant some as far as Dundee!

Furthermore, we were split into groups to attend different workshops. This provided an opportunity for the representatives of different universities to work together as a team to achieve a common objective. Therefore this activity encouraged unity amongst the UK teams.

Finally, the most exciting part of the weekend was getting to meet Randy Rettberg (iGEM president) who gave a very inspiring speech about iGEM, its challenges and benefits and future plans for the competition.

Well, I guess meeting and getting to know each other has led to encouragement and acquisition of new ideas, especially for new teams. Consequently, I believe the UK teams are now primed for the European Jamboree where we actually get to battle it out!

                                              Arrival and setting up of posters.    

                                           Our poster.

                                                Quezia and Dupsy .

                                             Dupsy explaining ideas on how to get funding.

Presentation for BPF

Today, we had a great opportunity to introduce our project to the industry and pitch for sponsorship at the British Plastics Foderation's conference.

Part of our team drove down to Birmingham to do a presentation at the conference, which was held at the Ramada Encore. The trip was great and the presentation went excellent! 

Here's a few pictures of the day: 

The grey MI6

Arrived at the Ramada Encore

Preparing for the presentation

Chris after the presentation- went well!

In addition to this amazing opportunity, some of the team will also spend the weekend in London, at the annual UCL iGEM teams meeting, with teams from all over the UK. There, they will have also have to present and introduce our project as well as participate in many other iGEM related activities, like workshops and feeback exercises. For more information about the event, check out their website: http://synbiosoc.org/ysb/

Since the team will be busy this week, attending and preparing for these exciting events, we have decided to postpone our sponsored walk until the 24th of July. Despite the postponement, the event is still very much happening and will be live streamed as promised. We are also very grateful to everyone for their donations and support! 

Recent happenings

It has been an eventful month for the iGEM team. We have been acitvely planning our sponsored walk, which is happening on 10th of July, having a bake sale and setting up other iGEM related activites.

On the sponsored walk, the team will be walking from Leicester to Market Harborough along the canal. The distance of our walk will be nearly 26 miles! To encourage larger donations, we will also accept any reasonable challenges for a donation, for example, walking backwards or doing a team pyramid. So if there is anything funny you'd like to see the team do on the walk, don't hesitate to let us know! 
The walk will also be live-streamed through the blog and twitter and we will even take video evidence!

There have also been exciting things happening to our team on the sponors side. To add to the increasing kindness of our sponsors, Dr. Richard Badge has met up with Mark Shelton of Heathrow Scientific who provided us with a full speed microcentrifuge! And in addition to that, at least £1000 worth of pipettes!!

Speaking of sponors, following our awesome team trip to Jablite/ Styropack, we will very soon have a blog post up talking specifically about the trip, so keep an eye out for that as well!

There is a lot more to update on, and we will have extra information up about our photoshoot and also a team trip to London on the 12th of July very soon!

Update

The photoshoot was a great success and the turnout was great! There will also be a press release to accompany the photo in the coming weeks.

In other news, as exams finish the first week on June, we will be visiting our sponsor Jablite / Styropack on the 6th of June. We will have a tour around the production plant and give a presentation about our project. 

Jablite / Styropack are one of top suppliers in Europe in plastics, especially polystyrene. We are happy to have them supporting us again this year, in our continued quest to try and make polystyrene more environmentally friendly, and in the development of our re-purpose stream for flame retardant polystyrene. 

The next team meeting will be held on the coming Wednesday with more exciting things to be organized. Meanwhile, we will be actively working on putting together our team profile, so that the faces behind the UoL iGEM team will finally be revealed.

Don't forget to also check our Facebook page and Twitter feed (@iGEMLeicester) for more updates on everything UoL iGEM!

iGEM team to be photographed!

Exciting news for the team, as we will have our photo taken with the Vice- Chancellor Professor Sir Robert Burgess.

The 'photoshoot' will take place next week. In addition to the new photo of the team, we will also be getting out team T-shirts by that time, which will also be featured in the photo.

So look out for our team photo introduction in the coming weeks! 

Welcome!

Welcome to our brand new blog!

We are still working on setting everything up fully, but that doesn't mean that the posting can't start!

This post is just a quick update for what is going on with this year's project. So far we have formed a team, paid our registration fee and outlined our mission. For more information about our mission, visit our Facebook page or check out the Project tab on blog, where a brief description is added.

We are also posting regular Twitter updates, so feel free to follow us on Twitter @iGEMLeicester.

We will be keeping the blog updated on all things UoL iGEM with several exciting things coming up very soon!

Stay tuned...