Continuing our interview series with last year’s gold medal winning iGEM team, we spoke to Suparna Thakali – a third year student at Kent, and the only person studying Biochemistry on the 2015 team. Here’s how she answered our questions.
Firstly, what was your role in the team and what were your main contributions to the project?
I was one of the people doing the lab based work and I mostly did Gibson Assembly, ligation reactions, and transformations.
How would you describe the overall experience of competing in iGEM?
I enjoyed it because you get exposed to different cutting edge technology in the field of science. We got to learn about different techniques from the other teams as well; when we went to the presentation we listened to the techniques that they used and we were able to share our knowledge too.
What were the main challenges that you had to overcome during the project?
Halfway through doing the project we ordered our by breaks and we had trouble getting our delivery from the company. So we had to develop other plans about how to go on with the project; with that we had help from our supervisors where we were able to develop a contingency plan. Time was another one of our main problems. Once we had to stay up until 8, just to do a Gibson Assembly, when we had to do transformation as well as the Gibson Assembly on the same day.