Collaboration
We really appreciate the goodwill in people and their ability to respond when someone needs help. We strive to maintain these qualities in ourselves. Therefore, we tried to help other teams and were not afraid to ask for help.
Moscow
The Moscow team helped us with the work. At the very beginning, when we were just starting work (the end of March 2021), the members of this team, namely Alexey Shaitan and Anastasia Kislova, helped us a lot. They told us about the subtleties of the contest, gave us a lot of useful advice and supported us in every possible way. If not for the help of the guys from Moscow, we would have failed a lot. We were also supported by Konstantin Kamenskikh (May-June). He helped us figure out siRNA for our work. We received a lot of new information from him and were able to move on. Before we started working with him, we were in a very deplorable situation and we could not get anywhere. Kostya was able to correct this situation.
Thus, the Moscow team has made a tangible contribution to our work. They helped us in the early stages of the project, and this is the most important help for us.
Stockholm
At the very beginning, we left a Collaboration Request on the iGEM page. Our request is the 5th on the list.Our request
In it, we offered assistance and talked about our technical capabilities, services that we can provide. The Stockholm team responded to this request. The negotiations were quite long because at first, we did not fully understand what the guys were going to do and how to technically implement it. In September, we finally managed to reach an agreement. The guys from Stockholm sent us their samples, but at the moment we have not received them due to long paperwork. which we had to face. Unfortunately, the planned experiment did not happen during the iGEM period, but we will definitely conduct it when we overcome the difficulties of obtaining samples from the Stockholm team. Moreover, we have already drawn up a clear plan of the experiment, we just need to get samples.Experiment plan:
We sincerely want to help the Stockholm team with their project, so we will definitely perform the experiment as soon as all the papers are in order, and the samples are in our hands
Istanbul_Tech
Our next collaboration was with a team from Istanbul Technical University. The guys created a mini-course on bioethics. Our team found it very entertaining, and we decided to participate. Their questions for discussion were especially cool and they made us think about very problematic and controversial issues. I think this interaction of teams is very important, as we help each other to rethink some principles, phenomena, and actions, in order to understand them and, perhaps, come to a different conclusion than before. This is a very important skill for scientists. We are sure that all the teams involved in this collaboration have felt this influence.
Istanbul Tech has united 14 teams: HKUST, TEC_COSTA_RICA, MEPhI, Moscow_City, Heidelberg, TU_Kaiserslautern, NU_Kazakhstan, IISER_Tirupati, NAWI_Graz, USP-EEL-Brazil, Phystech_Moscow, HK_GTC
Engineering Biology Problems Book
The idea of such a collaboration appeared spontaneously. Engineering Biology Problems Book was written by our PI, Ilya Klabukov, in 2019. This book is a collection of problems in engineering biology.
In the middle of the 20th century, the Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, presented a series of books “Feynman Lectures on Physics". They were simple, but very creatively formulated the basic postulates and problems of physics. We believe that engineering biology is the new physics of the 21st century. There are many unresolved problems in it, and we are sure that they can be solved only through international cooperation.
Driven by these ideas, we tried to gather teams to get at least a little closer to this goal.
The following teams participated in this collaboration: MEPhI, MIPT_MSU, Siberia, Phystech_Moscow, LMSU, Moscow_City, CAU_China, Stockholm.
It all started with Russian teams. We gathered together and translated the original collection into English. After that, we started working on the contents of the collection.We have done a lot of work, the result of which you can see here
The contribution of each of the teams is marked.
I would especially like to note the contribution of the MIPT_MSU team to this work, namely its leader, Dmitry Vladimirtsev. Dima added to our collection as many as 4 new problems with a solution. It's impressive! We are grateful for such a serious attitude to our joint work and are happy to cooperate with such a team.
There are many unsolved problems in this book, and we believe that they will be the beginning of many future projects on iGEM. And the teams will supplement it with new solutions and new tasks every year.