Team:Linkoping Sweden/Collaborations
Larger collaborations
During the course of our project, we have had larger collaborations within many different areas of our project. These have given us new knowledge and insights that have helped us along the way.
Nordic iGEM Conference
Early during the summer, our team together with the Chalmers-Gothenburg iGEM team began planning the Nordic iGEM conference, NiC, for this year. This is an annual conference hosted for all Nordic iGEM teams where they present their projects to the other participating teams, the public and a panel of judges. Furthermore, it includes workshops and presentations held by external researchers. This year, NiC was held by us together with Chalmers-Gothenburg as a two-day virtual and live-streamed event on the 30th of July to the 1st of August. We were also able to organize a joint meetup in Gothenburg, Sweden for the participating Swedish teams. All Nordic iGEM teams were invited to present their projects as well as attend two different workshops, one about each team’s iGEM experience so far, and one about safety and implementation of GMOs after iGEM. Furthermore, the teams attended three different presentations held by established researchers.
The judges panel consisted of four different judges, provided by the organizing teams. Our team provided the judges: associate professor Dr Patrik Lundström, and postdoctoral researcher Dr Ganesh Mohite, both working at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at Linköping University. The Chalmers-Gothenburg team provided: PhD student Linnea Österberg from Chalmers University of Technology, and associate professor Anne Farewell from the Institution of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at Gothenburg University. Based on the judges response to a judging form, prizes were awarded in the four categories: best project, best presentation, most creative project and best impact project. Our team won 3 out of the 4 categories (best project, best presentation, and most creative project), while the prize for best impact project went to iGEM Stockholm. In addition to prizes, each team received feedback on their presentation in the judging forms.
The first workshop that we created allowed the teams to get to know each other better as well as it gave them the opportunity to share the experiences and knowledge they had gained during their projects. The second workshop invited the teams to discuss an important aspect of working with synthetic biology and iGEM, the implementation of GMOs in the real world.
For the presentations, we invited Professor Per Hammarström, Associate Professor Lars-Göran Mårtensson from Linköping University and Associate Professor Anne Farewell from Chalmers University to hold inspirational lectures about their fields of research.
From planning and participating in NiC, we got a lot of helpful feedback regarding many different areas, such as how the project might look like after iGEM regarding cost and implementation from both the judges as well as the attending teams. All of this useful feedback further helped shape our project.
Exchange of knowledge and experience with iGEM IISER Pune and iGEM Brno
Early on in our project, we came in contact with iGEM IISER Pune who was another team working with cyanobacteria, however they worked with the strain Synechococcus elongatus UTEX 2973. We set up a meeting and exchanged knowledge about cyanobacteria and how to work with them. They also gave us useful knowledge on how to start up the modeling part of our project as well as referring us to Dr Sara Ahmed, a researcher specializing in water and rural development, currently on the board of WaterAid India. We helped them with finding experts working with metabolic engineering here in Sweden, as well as distributing a survey to high school students regarding their view on climate change and synthetic biology. The metabolic engineer we referred them to was Dr Pia Lindberg at Uppsala University and Professor Jens Nielsen from Chalmers University of Technology, and they were able to connect.
iGEM Brno’s project this year was a continuation of their project from last year, which included the usage of Carbohydrate Binding Domains (CBDs). Due to us planning on using CBDs to filter out our modified bacteria from desalinated water, we set up a meeting with them where they shared their experience with how to effectively use CBDs, what filter to use, and how the expression of CBD works. This ultimately helped guide us in the planning of our experiments.
Podcast episode with Lund
iGEM Lund had heard about our plans for making a podcast early on and decided to contact us to say that they wanted to be a part of an episode. Some time later, two representatives from their team traveled to Linköping to spend a day with us in the podcast studio. In the podcast episode they guested, we talked about their iGEM project this year, which is about probiotics and neurodegenerative diseases, about synthetic biology and iGEM in general. Furthermore, we discussed their experience with iGEM so far, both in regards to lab work and other aspects such as what they did for the human practice part of their project. This meeting with iGEM Lund gave us a deeper understanding of how synthetic biology can be used to solve real life issues and was a great opportunity to exchange knowledge.
Other Collaborations
Not only have we had larger collaborations that have been directly useful to our project, we have also had several other, smaller, collaborations that were meant to strengthen the feeling of community between the iGEM teams.
In this collaboration, we designed a postcard that reflected our project, and sent it to iGEM Düsseldorf. A couple of months later we got a package with several postcards from all over the world and other teams around the globe also got ours!
We took part in iGEM Warwick’s booklet, which aimed to educate high school students about iGEM, and the uses of synthetic biology. We wrote about our project, the importance of synthetic biology, and how our project could help solve a local and worldwide problem. We also provided the high schoolers with a task that they could do related to our project. This task was about making a poster about water shortage, and to brainstorm possible solutions to improve the situation. This allowed the students to research how water shortages affects the world more, as well as it challenged the students to think creatively.
This collaboration was about sending a paper airplane all around the world. For this, we filmed a short video of us catching and then throwing a paper plane to other iGEM teams.
We took part in a collaboration where teams from all around the world took pictures of their team members in front of monuments in their cities. We chose to take our picture in Linköping’s old town, sitting on the most standard vehicle of transportation in Linköping during the 1920s (probably).