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Collaborations

Global Brainstorming Session

In March, we hosted a global meetup for iGEM teams over Zoom. 23 teams from 18 different countries attended this brainstorming session.We had five different breakout rooms to tailor to each team’s interests. Two rooms were for discussing general ideas for iGEM teams who were starting from scratch. Another two were for more in-depth technical discussion such as for those who chose the 2-year plan. The last one was for those interested in brainstorming how to organize each team for productivity. Many of the teams that attended this session enjoyed it and thought it was very helpful. This was an excellent opportunity for the iGEM community to come together, discuss their projects, and bond over science! We used Google Jamboards to add notes while we discussed them in the breakout rooms so that everyone can remember the ideas discussed. Below you can find a screenshot of the discussion board from two of the breakout rooms and screenshots from each!

FCB-UANL

We met with FCB-UANL iGEM to continue our collaboration from last year. As we had determined in 2020, the United States has a more comprehensive regulation system for biotechnology than Mexico, which allows products to be implemented more frequently in the United States. Despite this, there are no existing pieces of legislation for phage therapy in the United States or in Mexico. Together we wrote and proposed legislation to implement phage therapy as a treatment for bacterial infections. We wrote legislation for both countries to create an equal opportunity for implementing synthetic biology products. Find our proposed legislation document here.

Rochester

We learned that the Rochester iGEM team also worked on sepsis this year from the global iGEM slack. This slack channel is a place for the iGEM community to communicate and share project ideas and form connections like this collaboration. We met with Rochester iGEM to discuss a possible collaboration and ultimately decided to design a children’s book about sepsis. A large portion of the population has not heard of sepsis let alone why it is such a challenge to treat. Since sepsis affects all ages including babies and young kids, we wanted to raise awareness focused on younger kids and their parents since kids have a harder time communicating what their bodies feel. Through multiple weekly meetings throughout July and September, we worked together to write the book script, illustrations, and page layout. The children’s book can be found here. They also invited us to present at a panel they hosted in September for sepsis awareness month. Here we learned how sepsis affects health care providers and those who have experienced it firsthand. Below you can find a screenshot of the members involved in the children's book creation on one of our first zoom calls!

Warwick

The Warwick iGEM team contacted us to participate in their outreach project: a booklet for 16-18 year olds on the importance of synthetic biology. For this, we filled out the form they sent us with information on our project, which included a project description, importance of synthetic biology in our project, importance of our project to the world, a task for the students reading the booklet to do, and our team logo. We hope our contribution can inspire future scientists.

SBU Talent Show

One of our team members submitted a project for the SBU talent show. Lindsey, our team president, crocheted a petri dish with blue-white colonies to demonstrate a useful screening technique. Crochet is not just for clothing and blankets. It has been used for educational purposes such as creating an anatomically correct life-size skeleton with removable organs, or tactile exploring of hyperbolic space. Our goal with this pattern was to connect with artists and allow more kids to be introduced to synthetic biology as a career path from an early age. More information can be found here.

MichiganState

We met with the MichiganState iGEM team to discuss our policy work from last year. During this meeting, we answered any questions they had on policy and shared the resources we used for our project last year.

Wiki Collaboration with MichiganState and WrightState

WrightState held a symposium for our region to present our projects and practice for the Jamboree. From this we discovered that WrightState is new to building their wiki so they joined our slack channel with MSU to exchange wiki questions and ideas. Along with this, we have met with MSU to collaborate on developing our wikis. Many of us were new to this topic, and by working together we were able to speed up the development of each of our wikis.We exchanged questions such as why a margin was not fitting the screen properly and learned the usefulness of the important! syntax. As we found more css functions and designs like our notebook page and communication we made sure to share it with Michigan State so they can conserve time by implementing our translated code that is fit for iGEM servers. Below is a screenshot of the attendees at the WrightState symposium!

William and Mary

We wanted to explore more effective ways to organize a modeling team. After looking through last year’s competition results we found Willian and Mary who had a well written and succinct modeling page. We met with them several times through the summer and fall. We found that they structure their modeling team similar to how we had begun with having a primary person working on one. And every member would take a secondary role in helping out where needed with the other project models. They also offered advice on what we could look into to add or fix our modeling code. We were trying to troubleshoot why our population control model was not showing an expected distribution of bacteria vs phage population. They recommended looking into epidemiology models (SIR compartmental model) to find the reason. These would be geared toward human dynamics but should be fairy similar to the bacteria model we started from.