Team:UI Indonesia/Collaborations

Collaborations

At the pandemic's beginning, we perceived COVID-19 and the physical and mobilization limitations as enormous obstacles to doing extensive collaborations. However, we are wrong since online things make us connected to even unreachable places geographically. We can do even more collaborations in numerous ways, especially for project dissemination, public engagement, and education.

This year, we collaborated with these extraordinary teams from Indonesia and of course, foreign countries.


iGEM ​​UGM held a seminar and talk show introducing synthetic biology & iGEM Competition on August 27, 2021. On this occasion, we are trying to introduce synthetic biology and the iGEM competition to webinar participants, mainly new students from Universitas Gadjah Mada Indonesia. Our team leader Kevin Tjoa delivered a presentation about synthetic biology and our project (HELICOSTRIKE) and answered several questions from participants. The seminar and talk show also presented the iGEM Brawijaya Indonesia team. We exchanged experiences about our projects, ranging from things we did in the laboratory to sponsorships. We also provide tips to seminars and talk show participants who are interested in forming a team and participating in the iGEM competition in the following year. We believe that this collaboration or partnership that we are doing can motivate our juniors to explore synthetic biology and participate in iGEM in the next opportunity. The following is documentation of activities from seminars and talk shows initiated by the iGEM UGM team



We work with the Thessaly team to help them provide Indonesian subtitles on their promotional videos. We translate their promotional video transcripts into Indonesian. The promotional video made by the iGEM Thessaly team consists of various foreign languages ​​, including Indonesian. The following is a screenshot of the promotional video of the iGEM Thessaly team with Indonesian subtitles


The iGEM Bielefeld team CeBiTec and our team worked together to translate the educational content of each team into the native language of each country, in this case, Germany and Indonesia. The educational content created by the iGEM Bielefeld CeBiTec team is an introduction to synthetic biology educational content. In contrast, the educational content from our team is a booklet about H.pylori infection and our project. Each team has a different form of delivery and theme for educational efforts, but both teams are very open to collaborating in providing education to more people around the world, one of which is by translating the educational content we create into various languages


We work together with the Brazilian UNESP team by helping each other to support each other's projects. We helped the UNESP Brazil team by filling out their survey regarding our participation in our team in the 2021 iGEM competition. Their team also helped us translate our booklet into their native language. This form of collaboration or partnership proves that the forms of collaboration that can be done at iGEM competition are not limited, each team can be creative in carrying out their projects, and other iGEM teams can help and support through various ways


The iGEM Korea_HS team helped us to translate our booklet into their native language. They helped us in our efforts to provide booklets in various languages, as an educational effort on H.pylori infection and IGEM competition to various countries around the world, especially in countries with a high prevalence of H.pylori infection


We collaborated briefly and pleasantly with the iGEM MTU team. We made a creation on their logo, and the creation contains a brief description of our project and also our hopes and passions about our HELICOSTRIKE project in this year's iGEM competition. Towards the days before the wiki freeze, we are happy to be still able to have fun collaborating with the iGEM MTU team

iGEM Competition also opens up opportunities. It is comprehensive for us to cooperate with teams who are also from Indonesia, in this case, iGEM UGM, and iGEM Brawijaya. We meet on various occasions and exchange stories or updates about our projects with each other. Some of the opportunities that we participated in and the highlights of these activities are as follows.


This activity was the first opportunity to gather, know each other, and discuss safety risks. On this occasion, the iGEM ambassadors, Jannah and Elissa, allowed us to exchange opinions regarding safety risks. This activity then paved the way for us to get to know more about each other's projects and open up opportunities for further collaborative activities


This activity is the second meeting we did after discussions and workshops on safety risks with the iGEM ambassador. On this occasion, we started exchanging stories about the educational project carried out by each team. Each iGEM Indonesia team is holding a webinar with the theme of synthetic biology and its various applications. On that occasion, we also discussed what forms of collaboration we can do in the future, both in the iGEM competition and outside. The head of our team's policy and practice division, Firda Izzain Baliyati, had the opportunity to be a moderator on this occasion.


Seminars and talk shows held by the UGM iGEM team became a forum for us to exchange information about our project and the process. Each team reintroduced their project in the seminar session and told about the project work process in the talk show session. This activity was held in August 2021, only two months from the wiki freeze, so this activity is also a place for us to update each other progress in iGEM competition

Collaborating with iGEM teams from around the world gives us a new perspective for us, the iGEM competition shows that cooperation and collaboration are very important to achieve goals, especially the goals of teams competing in iGEM are not just to compete, but also to explore science in the field of synthetic biology and develop it for the benefit of the wider community in their respective countries.

We hope the relationship may grow further, not just stop in iGEM Competition, but also in further research and development of synthetic biology especially advancement of technology and publication so our researches and projects are impactful for the public.