Team:Yonsei Korea/Partnership
Introducing:
Our Team
Our team’s partnership for iGEM 2021 is with the team from a university that our school shares one of the most storied rivalries in Korea, Korea University. The Yon-Ko (Yonsei vs. Korea) rivalry spans across multiple decades, from academics to athletics. By tradition, it only made sense that we were to reach out to each other as the only collegiate teams participating in this year’s iGEM from South Korea. This time, as sunbaes (a Korean word that means any senior in your school or work) who have participated in iGEM in years before, they offered valuable advice that helped us through our first-time journey, as well as sharing with us research experiences and hardships.
Early May, our team contacted Seongwook Lee, leader of the KUAS team out of frustration as our team was having trouble with all facets of launching our project off the ground. KUAS had already established a culture of iGEM and synthetic biology research at Korea University, and some of their members already had a year or two’s iGEMs under their belt. They happily offered to discuss our hardships with us, and we decided that a partnership could be mutually beneficial to both teams. Throughout the year, we collaborated through having discussions via Zoom, brainstorming ideas, and troubleshooting different problems we ran into during our journeys. For example, KUAS was the one to advise us to reach out to alumni companies to look for financial support, which helped us get on our feet during the early stages of research. Later during the research cycle, KUAS was having trouble finding laboratory space due to the COVID situation, so we shared with them how we negotiated to use our PI’s laboratory and vacant educational labs. We also shared knowledge on our research because we were both coincidentally conducting research on fungi. Although we could not collaborate on-site as we would have liked to due to the escalated COVID-19 situation in Korea, our collaboration helped both teams navigate the undergraduate research sphere, both academically and financially.
Yonsei_Korea is a convergent team of students based in Seoul, South Korea striving to create meaningful change utilizing synthtic biology in the iGEM 2021 Competition.