During the last weekend of August (29-30th), Bordeaux hosted the french meetup with the help of Capsciences (Scientific Museum in Bordeaux specialized in scientific popularization). We invited all french and francophone teams. Unfortunately, some teams couldnt assist but iGEM KU_Leuven (Belgium) , iGEM EPLF-Lausanne (Swizerland), iGEM Paris-Saclay , iGEM Paris Pasteur , iGEM Aix Marseille and iGEM Toulouse (France) came and enjoyed that moment with us.
On Saturday morning, iGEM Bordeaux organized a scavenger hunt in the city. The objective was to answer questions about synthetic biology and other iGEM projects to find clues for the next location they needed to go to. Divided into three teams, we were able to visit the beautiful city of Bordeaux which ended in a picnic at the Cap Science Museum!
There, teams presented their projects in front of other teams and general public at Capsciences and we talked about the inconvenient and advantages of each project. Each team had to make their presentation understandable for everyone. We also were lucky to have a theatre expert who gave us constructive feedback on the best way to present our projects at Boston and to a non-scientific public. You can see the French presentations down below! When every team finished their French presentation, each team made a very quick presentation of their project in English without a powerpoint, and then again, the public gave some advice for each team. You can see our English presentation following the link down below! After a long day of walk and talk, we went into a restaurant and went home to have a well-deserved rest to be ready for the Sunday activities.
On Sunday, we all met at the Parc Bordelais to do some activities proposed by other teams. Paris Saclay organized a debate about biosafety, and prepared a short video for each iGEM team presentation. This encouraged all teams to think about safety considerations in their project and allowed us to discuss general safety issues such as containing genetically modified organisms and ensuring that they do not become out of our control. You can see the little videos which have been made this day following this link: LINK. Afterwards, we had a discussion about Paris Pasteur's project and answered their Survey in order to help them with their project.
We would like to thank again all of the teams which came to our meetup, Cap Sciences for the loan of their place and for the videos. We also thank all the people who took pictures and videos this week-end and shared them with us.
When talking with Paris-Saclay during our meetup we were very interested in their project this year which is concerned about safety. Safety in our project is not a particular problem since we are using our genetically modified organisms for production and all cells are destroyed during Curdlan purification. However, when thinking about alternatives where our bacteria would be directly applied on grapevine leaves, these safety issues are extremely important. We spent some time with them during the meetup and afterwards thinking about Safety of our project.
The Oxford team of 2015 has generously proposed to help us to establish a short toxicology review of our Curdlan molecule. Our lab does not have the required material to do so and this would help complete our project. So we sent them a sample of our produced Curdlan so they could do tests on it.
Throughout the year, we have been contacted to answer surveys and to share surveys. We answered to the best of our abilities all of the following surveys: UI-Indonesian , UCL , TEC-Monterry. When possible we gave feedback to improve their surveys. We also participated in Paris-Bettencourt's rhizi project