Collaborations
In order to assist our project, we communicated with other iGEM teams by joining 2 symposiums. During both symposiums, each team was given a presentation time for introducing their current progress and ideas. After that, a question-and-answer section allowed all participants to share their views and suggestions. In the first UST symposium, the council house was left for teams to chat freely, ask for opinions and even construct collaboration after the presentation.
On 11 August 2021, six Hong Kong iGEM teams joined a full-day face-to-face symposium held by HKUST. We shared our project’s background information, experiment procedure, and human practice plan. While in the question-and-answer section, we received many questions from experts and professionals invited from universities and related fields for further elaboration in different aspects. For example, some considered economic factors like how to persuade purchasers to choose out product (spidroin) as rare materials, some targeted technology possibility, and potential concerns like whether the spidroin can maintain its strength after being mini repetitive. During the exchange of ideas, we had a better understanding of the shortcoming of our project and were able to develop. Surprisingly, we also got many valuable and constructive comments to improve our project. A team that conducted similar projects last year gave us some practical solutions and experiment directions. Moreover, we got inspired and learned a lot about the human practice plan from other teams’ presentations. In the free-talk time, we reached out to teams having similar projects and shared information as well as research reports or results, which greatly helped improve our project and gave us more possibilities in designing experiments. To conclude, we benefited a lot from this symposium.
On 16 October 2021, we joined a high school symposium, which was held online. We shared the backgrounds of our project, wet lab and dry lab results, and outcomes of the human practice parts. Meanwhile, we also heard presentations from other high school teams. We learned how other teams improve their works after receiving comments from the first symposium. For example, a team changed the objective of their product to make it more practical and competitive. On the other hand, we also learned about how others did their human practice. One team gave a talk in their school on their topic, while another team did a survey. Moreover, the symposium gave us a chance to further introduce our projects, especially answering questions from other participants. This way, we can have a better understanding of our shortage and the perspectives others may concern. For example, a team concerned how our spidroin fibres can turn into real threads for making clothes. Another team asked how we can make the spindroin non-biodegradable so that they will not ruin easily. These questions helped us to make our product better and more competitive. To conclude, we had a great chance to interact with other high school teams in this symposium.