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Collaborations
As the inaugural iGEM team at Broad Run High School, and also as one of the first iGEM teams in the Loudoun County school district, our 2015 iGEM experience has been founded on multiple collaborations. Without these collaborations, we would not be at this place with our iGEM project; with a working part that met our design goals of removing undesired starch in industrial wastewater and attending the Jamboree so we could share and learn more about the complex wonders of synthetic biology!
Armstrong, Lancaster, PA
When we reached out to Armstrong as a potential sponsor, we began a partnership where first they learned more about what iGEM and synthetic biology can do to solve real world problems, and we learned of problems that plague industrial manufacturing as they adapt to become more environmentally responsible. With their sponsorship, we furthered our understanding of Armstrong's water problem; through skype meetings with our team including our mentors Dr. Schiefele and Dr. Burkett, emails exchanges and querries on their manufacturing plant and process, documentation, schematics, photos of the plant. We collaborated with Armstrong’s Mr. Paul Hough and Mr. Hoosier, the technical expert for the plant who took time away from his job to attended one of our skype meetings just so we could get a better handle of the starch problem in the water. We worked together during the design phase of our project with their input and feedback, crucial to our solution. During the testing phase of our project, we also worked with Armstrong for water samples. We have communicated our findings to them with images of our results and received positive feedback and support for future collaborative work to refine our synthetic biology approach leading to an implementable solution.
BUGSS, Baltimore Underground Science Space, Baltimore, MD
Even before we had formed a team, during that very early stage of trying to bring iGEM to our school, our school’s administration rightfully raised concerns about fulfilling the ethical and safety requirements for carrying out an iGEM project. Because of this and the fact that our school lab did not have the resources for an iGEM project, Marissa Sumathipala and Adriel Sumathipala, who had prior interactions with BUGSS through their own research activities, contacted Dr. Lisa Schiefele and Dr. Tom Burkett of BUGSS. BUGSS, a citizen scientist biology hackerspace founded by Dr. Burkett, that had sent an community lab iGEM team to the 2014 iGEM Jamboree, was very supportive. After working out various aspects of such an effort, from teaching an introductory synthetic biology lab course by Dr. Schiefele to those team members that had not had prior lab experience needed for the project, safety and ethics aspects of the project, and logistics of doing the research at their lab, BUGSS came on board. We have since been mentored by Dr. Schiefele and Dr. Burkett and have conducted all our lab work exclusively at BUGSS. As BUGSS continues to grow and become known in the Baltimore and greater Washington area and also nationally, with a focus on synthetic biology, both as a place for creative engineering and educating adults and a generation of youth, our collaboration with BUGSS as an iGEM team is also advancing their vision for youth education and engagement. Together, we are bringing synthetic biology to the forefront of education, public awareness, and creative problem solving.
Rockridge High School iGEM Team, Loudoun County, VA
From the inception, we have been in continuous dialog with Mr. Saavedra, the instructor of Loudoun County’s only other iGEM team at Rockridge High school. Also being a first time team like us, we maintained communication and correspondence via phone voice calls, emails, texts, and at least two visits to Rockridge. These dialogs covered diverse topics from fundraising ideas for registration fees and jamboree fees, equipment, lab resources, research topics, project implementation approaches, and details of lab work.
On August 13, two of our team members, Marissa and Fionn, and our instructor, Nina Arendtsz, visited the Rockridge team at their school. We met and talked to the students working on the project, discussed issues with writing code for the wiki, and learned a lot more about their project including observing some of their preliminary results of gels. Their team offered us lab resources to incubate cultures and we offered them to use the electroporator at BUGSS lab, a piece of equipment not available at Rockridge. We spent over an hour and a half at this iGEM team meetup at Rockridge. Having worked extensively with fruit flies, Marissa gave them advice on how to best care for and test the fruit flies they were using for their project. The latter part of our conversation was geared towards planning for the trip to Boston to attend the Jamboree. Given both teams limited resources, and in the spirit of iGEM, we planned on sharing a single large beach rental property further away from the Convention Center so as to keep our costs low and also to use it as an opportunity to support each other. However, this did not transpire as the Rockridge team’s Jamboree attendee count was uncertain with their fundraising efforts continuing.