Team:Macquarie Australia/Collaborations
Collaborations
This year’s Macquarie University iGEM team collaborated successfully with teams from 10 other universities. In doing so, we enhanced our own outreach activities as well as assisting other teams to reach their goals - with regards to the scientific completion of both their projects and their human practice goals.
For our major collaboration, we were able to assist University of New South Wales, to achieve their goals by sending them a transfectable Synechocystis strain, along with an integrative plasmid psBH02 (Synechocystis hemeoxygenase II that had kanamycin resistance), for use as a positive control in the transformation. This clone was useful to them as they had problems with the transformation of their Synechocystis strain.
The iGEM teams representing University of Sydney, Linköping University, Birbeck University and Oxford University directly took part in an episode of the world’s first synthetic biology themed gameshow, So You Think You Can Synthesise. Trinity College Dublin also added So You Think You Can Synthesise to their Youtube channel, helping to spread the word of synthetic biology and iGEM.
We took part in the outreach activities of other teams as well; for the team representing the University of Colorado Boulder, we constructed a short video addressing questions relating to our understanding of fracking; for team Paris-Saclay, we filled out a survey answering questions about our choice of chassis and participated in a synthetic-biology themed music video for Linköping University. We also answered surveys for the Oxford University teams about our iGEM experience and synthetic biology in general, respectively.
Australian iGEM Meet-ups
The Macquarie University iGEM team, and the teams representing the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales gathered to meet on two separate occasions - the 15th of July and the 15th of September.
On each occasion, all three teams delivered presentations detailing their project aims progress-to-date. These presentations were followed by questions, feedback and collaboration discussions which proved highly fruitful for all three teams.
