Team:Stony Brook/Partnership
Navigating to Partnership
Partnership
Stony_Brook x Sydney_Australia
We partnered with iGEM Team Sydney_Australia to further our knowledge of synthetic biology and discuss our projects with bi-weekly dry-lab, wet-lab and outreach updates. Our teams met one another through the Biodiversity Symposium. From there, we set up a partnership with our initial meeting 8/1/21 with subsequent bi-weekly meetings lasting until 10/10/2021. Each week, we alternatingly presented different research articles starting from those that were a major influence to our projects to those that related to greater concepts in Synthetic Biology. All presentations and some of the Journal Club meetings that we decided to record can be found here.
Our discussion ranged from talks on A. balylyi and Spingomonas to MC-LR degradation. It then grew to new forms of identification for the Covid delta variant, low-cost CRISPR based testing, Paclitaxel genome assembly and finally wearable freeze-dried cell free biosensors. These journal club meetings broadened both of our knowledge on synthetic biology and helped to open our mind to other project ideas for our future teams/ projects. The last couple papers helped us see ways in which we could expand the future directions of our project. Through the analysis and discussion of the articles, we were also able to learn to critique papers and pick out what points of a paper are important for presentation.
Through our biweekly updates on our project, we were able to exchange ideas and inspirations in terms of what to do for outreach. We were also able to vent our dilemmas with wet-lab and dry-lab results for our team, and lack of wet-lab due to Covid for Sydney_Australia. We also shared our dry-lab resources with one another to see how both of our teams were handling dry-lab. When needed, our teams suggested each other’s advisors and different dry-lab resources we have for each other. These can all be found in “iGEM-Protein Modelling” and “Stony_Brook Dry-Lab Work” of the shared folder.
IISER-PUNE-India x Hong_Kong_HKU x Toulouse_INSA_UPS x Stony_Brook
We partnered with IISER-Pune-India, Hong_Kong_HKU and Toulouse_INSA-UPST to host a 2-day symposium called the Cyanobacteria Symposium. On Day-1, several iGEM teams (including ourselves) with projects relating to Cyanobacteria presented our project to Cyanobacteria experts. The experts, from several countries (Dr. Himadri Pakrasi, Dr. Daniel Ducat and Dr. Gordon Taylor, Dr. Tiago Selao Toscano), gave us critical feedback on our project which we used to further develop our project as part of integrated human practices. On Day 2, we invited speakers for a wiki-workshop, a talk on new research on Cyanobacteria followed by fun games to end the day. This event taught us to practice scientific communication at the level of scientists and we were able to get critical feedback on our project in terms of difficulty with membrane anchoring and our project method (such as how we plan to test our experiment). We were also inspired by the other teams in terms of their projects but also their presentation styles.
The partnership began in July with the planning phase where we planned what the symposium would contain, what the set-up and timeline would be and who to reach out to. We divided up work amongst ourselves to find Judges, and people to host workshops. We also worked together to create advertisements and reach out to participants. Some of this work can be found in the following folder.
IISER-PUNE-India x Hong_Kong_HKU x Stony_Brook
Our previous collaboration than dwindled down to IISER-PUNE-India and Hong_Kong_HKU to host The Future in Synbio Workshop where each of our team came up with presentations geared towards high school students, which are mentioned in the “Education” segment of our wiki but also listed below.
The first presentation was “Introduction to Synthetic Biology,” which covered the basic model of gene transcription, translation and some gene editing techniques, presented by IISER-Pune_India, followed by “What is iGEM” from Stony_Brook. This was to highlight how day-to-day students can get involved in synthetic biology to solve world-wide issues but also to get students interested in joining/ forming their own high school level/ undergraduate iGEM Team. The Hong_Kong_HKU presented “Microbes and Society,” an interactive discussion of the different types of micrones, what their role in synthetic biology is and recent advancements. Finally, team Stony_Brook hosted a “Guess the Scientist” game which aimed at identifying key scientists who made an advancement in the field of biology and fostering a sense of importance for crediting and acknowledging the people whose knowledge and work we are using to advance our field. It also delved into the struggles that female scientists specifically have faced in their career and aimed to motivate students to pursue their career without ever giving up. All 4 presentations can be found in this folder.
This partnership officially ended September 18th, 2021.
