Team:Vilnius-Lithuania/Team/Meetup
Meetup with SDU team
iGEM competition is not only about science. Communication between young and promising scientists is undeniably one the most important parts of iGEM. Just as we started our project, we decided that it is really important to form collaborative connections with other iGEM teams in order to integrate our own team into iGEM community and advance the integration of Lithuanian scientists into worldwide scientific community as well.
We got the chance to fulfill our expectations pretty soon. On June 1st – 3rd, 2015, we hosted a meetup with a SDU iGEM team from University of Southern Denmark. It was a great opportunity to meet other iGEMers.
SDU team already have participated in iGEM competition for 5 times, so they have a lot of background knowledge and experience to share with the first-timers such as we are. They were the first ones to propose a meeting between teams, so we gladly accepted and listened to all the advices they gave us.
On the first day we presented each other our iGEM project ideas and discussed their importance, methods, application and other aspects. SDU iGEM team helped us a lot to gain a better insight on how to start and make a succesful iGEM project. They made a presentation on wiki creation and style, also a presentation on what is iGEM competition in general and what requirements we should not forget. All this information was not only helpful, but interesting as well and out of this meetup Vilnius iGEM team obtained tons of experience.
On the second day both teams had a visit to a local Thermo Fisher Scientific, where scientists presented their work and achievements and told us a little bit of history of this exact company, how it came to be and how it evolved from Fermentas in Lithuania. After that, we had several lectures on different topics: it was mainly related with the researches made here, in Lithuania. It was really interesting to listen how normal scientific research at the Institute of Biotechnology is made.
During the last day we visited the old town of our capital Vilnius and the main historical and cultural sites. We hope that SDU team enjoyed our meeting as much as we did and learned interesting and useful facts as well.
Big thanks goes to:
- SDU iGEM team – for coming!
- Giedrius Gasiūnas for a lecture about CRISPR/Cas system and its application.
- Aleksandras Osipenko for a lecture about modular proteins and nucleic acid technologies.
- Robertas Galinis for a lecture about microfluidics.
- ThermoFisher Scientific for a guided tour around the laboratories.