Team:Qdai/Partnership
Partnership
We, iGEM Qdai, were the first team to participate last year. Since our first tournament was online, we were also nervous about participating this year. Although we did not participate last year, iGEM Gunma is participating in iGEM 2019. This has given us a lot of advice. What is particularly difficult in iGEM is what they evaluate. As a pioneer of iGEM Japan, they gave us various advices on wiki creation and evaluation points through slack. Since last year, we have been interacting with the Gunma University team on a daily basis, aiming for a higher level of the synergistic effect with each other. We partnered with the Gunma University team to exchange ideas to refine the project and achieve a common goal together. The goal of our partnership is to develop the Japanese team. There are not as many teams in Japan as in other countries, and the native language is not English, so there are many hurdles to iGEM. This partnership is not only to develop our project, but also to exchange ideas on how to make iGEM easier to implement in Japan in the future. We have held joint meetings and created a slack for all members of the two teams to exchange ideas.
Being able to communicate with people in the same position on each team has helped us solve problems faster. The continuous interaction made it easier to ask for their opinions. We worked together to make each other's teams better, from wet labs, modeling, and other synthetic biology-related activities, to fundraising, wiki creation, and team management. At first, our goal was to learn how other teams were dealing with things that we were not doing well and to interact with each other as a Japanese team, but through continuous interaction, we helped each other more than we thought we would, and at times we worked hard together to complete our respective projects. As the number of communities we could rely on decreased due to the pandemic, being able to cooperate with Gunma University was extremely valuable to us.
This year, Kyushu University's project name is "Alternative to canary", which aims to create a device to detect toxic gases. Gunma University's "Making hot springs safer! E. coli decomposing biofilm containing Legionella bacteria." In circulating hot springs, Legionella bacteria may grow during the circulation process, and the project is to improve the sterilizing effect of chlorine chemicals to prevent this. We had one thing in common in that we were based on social issues. Then, as a development of our daily exchange, we held a meetup with the theme "How should we use Japan's resources sustainably? We were able to make it a meaningful time for both teams to exchange ideas.
