Team:Sorbonne U Paris/Partnership
Phototrophs
Collaborations are essential during iGEM, it’s a good occasion to meet other teams and do fun projects. Those collaborations can go a step further and become partnerships. This year we had the opportunity to be involved in the Phototrophs collaboration gathering teams working with phototrophic organisms (Marburg, Biefeld, ASU, Aboa, LMSU, Linköping, Madrid, Miami, Toulouse, Victoria-Wellington teams). This partnership was initiated by the Marburg team and the Biefeld team. They organized four meetups with workshops, team presentations and troubleshooting sessions. The end goal of this partnership was to create a handbook on how to do synthetic biology with phototrophs.
Meetups
Four meetups were organized, one each month between June and September. Scientists were invited each time to present either their research subject or a specific technique used on phototrophs. We especially enjoyed the workshop on the MoClo as we had planned to use it to build our construction. Rene Inckemann presented in detail the full logic and protocol which allowed us to better understand it. For most of our team members, we first heard about this technique and we had difficulties to really comprehend it so it was good to have someone experienced to give us an overview.
Four meetups were organized, one each month between June and September. Scientists were invited each time to present either their research subject or a specific technique used on phototrophs. We especially enjoyed the workshop on the MoClo as we had planned to use it to build our construction. Rene Inckemann presented in detail the full logic and protocol which allowed us to better understand it. For most of our team members, we first heard about this technique and we had difficulties to really comprehend it so it was good to have someone experienced to give us an overview.
Meetups were also the occasion to get to know the other teams, talk about each other’s projects and have some troubleshooting sessions. The slack created for the phototroph was also a great way to ask questions when we were a bit lost. It was really reassuring to know we could count on other people who were dealing with the same issues!
During the last two meetups after listening to experts, it was our turn to become ones. After all, we had gained experience and we had some experience and knowledge to share. During the third meetup, the team’s presentations were focused on the challenges faced while working with phototrophic organisms. During the last meetup, we talked more about the ethical and safety aspect of iGEM. It was the opportunity to show our work beyond the scientific aspects. We’ve decided to present how we communicated our project to the world through events, media and social networks. It was nice to have some feedback on our work especially because some events were still coming up. One thing that really came out of this meeting that we hadn’t really focused on before were the safety aspects and the way GMOs were viewed, especially in Europe. This meeting started a conversation in our team to try to challenge our project a bit and find the weaknesses regarding biosafety. As we are working on closed systems in space it was hard to find documentation on safety, we had pushed the issue to the side and it pushed us to tackle it at last.
Handbook
The organizing teams offered to share our experience working with phototrophs in a handbook. This handbook aims to collect protocols, strategies and issues we had faced so the future iGEM team could learn from it and find resources when they’re trying to build their project or when they’re encountering issues. We contributed to three parts: transformation (indirect method and overview), assembly standards and growth and culture for algae. We based our contribution on the bibliography as well as our own experience. To deepen our parts we also interviewed scientists who are working daily with phototrophic organisms as they have more knowledge than us to pass on. We truly hope it will be helpful to other teams, we certainly learned a lot from the other teams.
In the end, we really enjoyed this partnership. It really shaped our project as we had the occasion to learn from scientists during the meetups but also from the other teams. They challenged us in the way we decided to design and test our project but also on the way we led human practices. Writing the Handbook was also a great occasion for us to pass on our knowledge and gather the work we had done in preparation for the redaction of our wiki.
