We have returned from an amazing experience at the 2015 iGEM Jamboree! We've had the opportunity to meet and present to brilliant teams from all over the world, attended workshops that have further prepared us for graduate school, and were even fortunate enough to have a private tour of the Wyss institute research facility.

Sadly, we did not place this year. However, we made many contacts from iGEM, industry, and universities that are very enthuisiastic about helping us continue and complete our work. Our next goals throughout the school year are to test for the efficient biofuel production, sequence the genomes of the novel organisms we found, and better our software tools for future research. This project is still very important to us, because we want to do our part to help improve green energy technology and make it so that climate change is no longer an issue for us or for future generations. 

Thank you all so much for all of your support and your belief in us! We wish you a fantastic weekend! 

Ps. for more in depth information about our project, please visit our wiki at: 

http://2015.igem.org/Team:UCSC

After one month of hard work and all of your support, we've not only reached our goal, but surpassed it for a grand total of $12,817! We would like to thank everyone that contributed and spread the word about our work! You've made a tremendous impact in helping us complete our project, and getting much of our team to Boston to present our finding! 

We will continue updating over the upcoming month, so please stay tuned! We wish you all have a great day! 

http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2015/08/19/sustainable-power-through-brainpower/

The Home Stretch! Only $648 and 16 hours to go on our Crowd funding page! Currently our anchor team is hard at work calling alumni to get us where we need to be!

Thank you very much for everyone's support and if you haven't already, please visit our website and spread the news about us!

By the way, did we mention that we made it into the news again?

We are just $2,180 away from our goal to send 6 students to the iGEM jamboree in Boston! We are excited to share our research with the scientific community. We are busy finishing up our thesis and creating multiple presentations for the jamboree. Please encourage your networks to support us to ensure our core team is able to present our findings at the conference!

Hello to all our donors and page viewers,

This week all three of our teams have been hard at work on PCR's, Gel Electrophoresis, and Gas Chromatography. On top of that, ten of our teammates have registered for the competition, plus we have booked our hotel for the stay. Our team is anxious to present our research at the Jamboree in Boston, and this is only possible with your generous support.

One of our Field teammates is pictured below performing a single colony isolation! Our Breakdown team's inoculation of H. Hispanica has shown incredible growth and is a deep orange. 

For more constant updates on our progress, please check out our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ucscigem. Please continue sharing our crowdfunding page and spreading the word with family, friends, and colleagues who would find our research interesting!

Thank you again for your support!

Our team made it onto the Santa Cruz Sentinel this week. They did a short piece on our research background and our team dynamics. Check it out the article below:

 http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/social-affairs/20150720/ucsc-students-seek-solutions-in-salt

Thank you so much to all our donors! Please keep sharing our post so we can make it all the way to our goal, and send our team to the Jamboree! 

One of our teams, the Field team, is seeing growth in the samples that they collected from the salt flats in the East Bay and plated with cellulose. Keep checking our updates to follow our progress with these samples and with the other two teams.