Collaborations

It takes many recourses to accomplish extensive projects and collaborating with other teams is an important part of iGEM. In this project, our team has collaborated with several other iGEM teams in the aim to reach further. Presented below are the highlights of our collaborations, namely The Wiki Wizard, The BioBrick Workshop, No Money, No Project and What is Fracking? 

The Wiki Wizard

Creating and editing wiki pages, uploading files with the correct name can be a tedious task. Therefore we are making the Wiki Wizard, which helps with the naming of pages and files, making sure that they have the correct namespace etc. Also it has a WYSIWYG editor for content and syntax highlighted editors for html, javascript and css files.

It can be found on GitHub.

The BioBrick Workshop

The DTU iGEM team of 2015 hosted and prepared the content of the BioBrick Workshop from the 24^th to the 26^th of April, 2015. SDU, UNIK Copenhagen, and DTU collaborated to represent every iGEM team within Denmark. teams also participated. The BioBrick Workshop was an initiative to educate iGEM team members with the basic lab competences required to perform a synthetic biology project as ambitious as iGEM. It also provided an opportunity to introduce fellow iGEMers to general lab safety and cloning techniques while strengthening the social dynamics within the teams.

Highlights of the program included a general assembly tutorial for the creation of a new BioBricks independent of organism and project. In the tutorial, the teams practiced designing primers for Uracil Specific Excision Repair (USER) cloning and they integrated a green fluorescent protein expression cassette into a target location on the chromosomal DNA of E. coli. In order to teach everyone a variety of techniques, the iGEM teams were mixed and half of the groups used the USER-cloning technique while the other half used traditional restriction enzyme cloning techniques. As safety is of great importance in our human practice a basic safety guide along with specific guidelines for working within the DTU GMO lab were provided before attendance.

The BioBrick Workshop was also a great opportunity to extract the hard-earned knowledge from previous iGEM alumni. Our own Kristian Davidsen was instrumental in running the experimental work and discussing the theory behind our lab work. SDU was kind enough to provide two alumni presenters for a session on how to create an effective wiki.

The complete agenda for the workshop can be found here along with the SOPs, both of which can be used to inspire future teams to host their own BioBrick workshop. This is attributed on their wiki pages both SDU and UNIK Copenhagen.

No Money, No Project!

Getting the money to run such a big project as the one we have undertaken is not cheap. Therefore we have used many hours on getting sponsors and applying for different grants to make sure that we were able to participate in the iGEM competition.

The iGEM 2015 team from Københavns Universitet did not have as much time to apply for grants as we had therefor we sent them our list of grants and our template for grant applications so that they would be able to apply for the money and consumables that whey would need to make there project a reality. This is attributed on their wikipage.

What is Fracking?

In mid August we received a request for a helping hand from the CU Boulder from the University of Colorado. As a part of their project concerning hydraulic fracturing, they inquired our team about our conception and personal opinion of the topic. In response we provided the requested answers on a short video recording. Read more about the CU Builder project and the awareness campaign at their iGEM wikipage. We have been credited for our contribution on their Attribution page.