Partnerships
Partnerships
We were also able to establish two wonderful partnerships this year. One with the team of iGEM Paris Bettencourt and one with iGEM Bielefeld:
Partnership Bielefeld-CeBiTec 2021 - the Phototrophic community
First of all we want to highlight our fantastic partnership with the team of iGEM Bielefeld.
Together we build a community of iGEM teams working together on phototrophs. Our goal is to grow this great
community further and make it accessible and available for future iGEM teams. We initially met very early in
the project and worked together on our Partnership for the entire iGEM season. We hosted four meet-ups in
different areas from working with phototrophs to human practices ideas for interested iGEM teams of this
year's competition. The meet-ups focused on the teams' individual projects, scientific talks and also included
sessions dedicated to troubleshooting where questions from the teams about their scientific parts could be
clarified.
The partnership also includes a handbook of over 160 pages explaining the basics of working with phototrophs
to future teams. The handbook is co-written by nine other iGEM teams, which all also attended the meet-ups. We
hope that our handbook can help to standardise the methods with which phototrophs are handled, to ensure that
future researchers can fall back on a set of guidelines.
To finish up on our partnership Julia, Lennart and Paul of iGEM Bielefeld visited us in Marburg for a weekend
to further work on the handbook and organize establishing the community for future iGEM Teams. Over two
work-intensive days, we finalised the handbook and started with the establishment of the phototrophs community
for future iGEM teams.
Partnership Paris Bettencourt 2021 - "Remote Lab"
In our second partnership we worked together with iGEM Paris Bettencourt 2021 on a "Remote Lab"
project.
Getting access to a fully equipped laboratory is always a challenge for new iGEM teams and especially during
the pandemic it was extremely difficult and sometimes even impossible for many teams to get the needed lab
space. In order to address the obstacles which teams are facing, we aim to build a lasting platform to connect
future iGEM teams to share their resources and equipment to collaborate with each other from afar.
To test our idea of teams sharing resources and equipment, both teams performed a number of experiments to
ensure reproducibility and in-depth troubleshooting. We both had access to a Beckman Coulter Echo™ liquid
handler and used a high-throughput method for Golden Gate assembly during the experiments.
We hope that, with our platform, iGEM teams can collaborate more easily with other teams that own more modern
or different equipment to achieve better results and strengthen the iGEM community by sharing experience and
resources.