Team:IISER Kolkata/Collaborations

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Team IISER Tirupati

The first in our list is an amazing event which we had the pleasure to organize and execute. Following days of planning and brainstorming, our team conducted, along with the team of IISER Tirupati, an online workshop with the purpose of educating female high school students in the basics of synthetic biology and its applications. Simply named as “Gene Gala”, the event was conducted over five days in the month of June from the 12th to the 16th, which saw enthusiastic participation of female students from different schools across Delhi under the aegis of the Directorate of Education (DoE), Delhi. Being conducted as a mini summer camp/ school, the workshop witnessed enthusiastic participation, with more than 90 student attendees and their teachers from their respective schools. The lesson plan, designed by IISER Tirupati, was made with the objective of it being suitable for the level of high school students keeping in mind the curricula of schools the students hail from. We managed to cover various topics by means of day-wise lecture slides and supplementary activities and quizzes with each day’s lecture. The last day was specifically dynamic as we tasked the students to come up with ideas of their own to use synthetic biology to solve a certain issue, on the lines of iGEM. Enriched with a plethora of ideas and a multitude of perspectives, we got a glimpse of the ways in which children are capable of grasping different concepts and unleashing their potential to craft new ways of solving real life problems. We had a lively discussion with the students and their teachers over these five days which helped us understand our areas for improvement and gave us an opportunity to ignite the interest of synthetic biology in young and aspiring minds. This effort of ours has been officially acknowledged by the Directorate. Detailed information is available in our Education page !

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Collaborating with Team Tirupati
Team GoParisSaclay

Team GO Paris Saclay purified cas13a and tested our miRNA targets of the detection part in the cas13a system that they managed to produce and purify. The miRNA targets and the activity of cas13a on them has been successfully affirmed by the GO Paris Saclay team. More information on the collaboration, including the experimental results, can be found in our Results page !

Team IISER Berhampur

We participated in the iGEM Global CRISPR Conference hosted by IISER Berhampur and presented our project discussing its various aspects in detail. We emphasised on the gravitas of the problem caused by Bovine Mastitis in the dairy industry, and how our project aims to tackle the issue via diagnostic as well as therapeutic approaches. We emphasised on the technical aspects of our project alongwith how are using CRISPR to execute the diagnostic part of our project, explaining the detection part of our project. We had a very productive session discussing our project. Details of the same can be found in our education page under the section of other educational activities.

Team NTU Singapore

We started off with discussing our projects and subsequently deliberated on possible areas of collaboration. We decided to collaborate by helping each other carry out surveys and interviews. We circulated two google forms framed by team NTU Singapore on C ovid-19 and Cancer. The form for Covid-19 aims to gauge how willing people are in using their kit for Covid-19 testing, as the kit designed by NTU Singapore is less invasive than current methods of testing and also the kit is not necessary to be operated by professionals. The form on Cancer aims to understand if people are willing to regularly test for cancer using their less invasive testing kit. NTU Singapore also circulated our survey forms which we designed to conduct a general awareness survey amongst college students about bovine mastitis, it's harmful effects upon cattle and humans, the harmful effects of antibiotics and awareness about synthetic biology. Participation in our surveys is completely voluntary and anonymous, with no information of the persons filling the forms being collected.

We also helped the team of NTU Singapore schedule and conduct interviews with some students of our institute who graduated during the pandemic and a medical student as well regarding Covid-19, its impact on their lives and regarding self-test kits.

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Team CCU Taiwan

For Team CCU Taiwan, we translated their parent-child picture book to Assamese. Assamese is the official language of the state of Assam, in the North-eastern part of India. Titled “The War on Germs”, the picture book aims at inculcating awareness in children regarding the issue of superbugs. By collaborating with different iGEM teams to translate their book, CCU Taiwan aims to overcome language barriers while making children aware of the issues caused by superbugs.

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You can find our translated version of the picture storybook by CCU Taiwan right below !

Team Crete

We collaborated with team iGEM Crete by providing an excerpt on the potential way in which synthetic biology can be used to deal with the rising issue of antimicrobial resistance. Team iGEM Crete aimed to make a repository of information related to biology which would be translated into braille of different languages. This would enhance their database of information in braille. Our team member D. Nivedaa penned a short excerpt on the aforementioned topic in English, which was subsequently translated to Bengali. We shared these excerpts with Team iGEM Crete for it to be translated to Bengali braille. This was our small contribution in the initiative by Team iGEM Crete to create a global database of information of biology in braille. The translated braille version of our excerpt, titled “SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: THE KRYPTONITE AGAINST SUPERBUGS”

Team Guelph

Team Guelph compiled short summaries of iGEM projects around the world which were credited to the respective teams and posted on their website for public access. We filled out an interview form regarding our project. Our submissions were compiled as educational material meant for Canadian high school students in the age group of 14-18 years and distributed to teachers to contribute to the curriculum, with our team being credited as required. We answered questions pertaining to the general design of our project , the experiments we are performing and other aspects of our project. We also submitted an illustrative presentation explaining our project which could be incorporated as educational material.

ASPIC CLUB, Yuvaraja’s College

We conducted a podcast in collaboration with the Antibiotic Stewardship and Prevention of Infection in Communities ( ASPIC) club of Yuvaraja’s college, Mysuru. The podcast was conducted on the topic of antibiotic resistance. We delivered an overview of our project and talked on topics like how subclinical mastitis enhances the problem of AMR and how synthetic biology can be utilised to deal with the same. The ASPIC Club has uploaded this podcast session on their YouTube channel. More details on this collaboration can be found under the Blogs, articles and podcasts section of our Education page !

Collaboration with institute clubs

Literary club

We collaborated with the literary club of our institute and conducted two events, Bio-Katha and ink-Life. In the first event, Bio-katha, participants were asked to compose a fictional story with no limits on the topic. Ink-life was a non-fiction creative essay writing event. Both events were conducted under the theme of biology. More information on the same can be found under the Synthetic Biology through the arts section of our Education page !

Music club

In collaboration with the music club of our institute, we conducted an event named Syn-chrome which consisted of two parts. Participants had to modify a popular song or alternatively, can come up with original compositions of their own and set them to music. More details can be found under the Synthetic Biology through the arts section of our Education page !

E-cell

We collaborated with the E-cell, i.e. Entrepreneurship cell of our institute, to plan and pitch our project as a startup idea and further deliberate on the budget, market analysis and business strategy in order to develop a strong entrepreneurial framework for our project. More details on the same can be found in our Entrepreneurship page !

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