Cooperation & Celebration
During the last months, we had the pleasure to meet and collaborate with a great number of passionate and creative iGEM Teams. On the one hand, we will elaborate all active collaborations with iGEM Teams. On the other hand, we will name all iGEM teams we simply visited for some scientific exchange and having fun together. In short, this is the page of Cooperation & Celebration !
Click on the tiles below to navigate through our Collaborations:
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Cooperation within iGEM
Future iGEM Team of the "Westfälische Hochschule"
Quite at the start of our project, we were contacted by a group of students and their professor from the college from Recklinghausen. They are considering to participate in iGEM 2016 and had a lot of questions on how to build up an iGEM Team and manage an iGEM project. We were glad to welcome them in Aachen and answer all of their questions regarding BioBricks, judging and project organization. We hope that they will become part of iGEM next year and wish them all the best!
The students from Recklinghausen were accompanied by a supporting and potential future instructor Dr. Frank Eiden. Later that year Dr. Eiden was attending the same SynBio Symposium as our team. We took the chance to get some feedback on our project and won him over for an [http://igem.rwth-aachen.de/2015/index.php/Team:Aachen/Practices/Community_Labs#Discussions_and_Interviews_at_an_interdisciplinary_Symposium interview on Community Labs].
We also met him at the Maker Faire and had an interessting discussion about synthetic biology and our prototype.
HS Slovenia - Biosafety
In cooperation with the highschool-team from Slovenia, we have assessed the contamination level of different surfaces in the lab. A detailed description of these experiments is located on the safety page.
University of Oslo - MDH Assays
When the project descriptions came online it became apparent that team UiOslo and we were working with a very similar methanol dehydrogenase. After some initial Skype calls where we discussed our projects, we started to collaborate on Mdh activity assays. Team Oslo did not have access to a microplate reader, but luckily we were able to find the optimal conditions for doing the Nash-Assay for formaldehyde detection. In addition to that, they built upon the methane sensor that we developed previously.
At the 12th of June, the iGEM Team Darmstadt came to visit us. Due to the technical nature of the teams Darmstadt and Aachen, we have compared how both of our teams are operating. The team organization of TU Darmstadt is completely different to ours, but nevertheless we offered them an instance in tubefront. The feedback that we got from team Darmstadt helped us to understand how we could improve our software.
Apart from presenting and discussing ours as well as their project and spending two fun days together, we invited them to have a deeper discussion about the growing Community Lab scene in Germany. All the participants of this discussion group had quite different knowledge about community labs ranging from having heard about their existence up to being an active member of a community lab.
Together, we had a first evaluation of the general pros and cons of community labs. Our discussion can be subdivided into three main topics: Exemplary Features, Risks & Solutions and Gain. The elaborated protocol of our discussion is shown [http://igem.rwth-aachen.de/2015/index.php/Team:Aachen/Collaborations/Darmstadt here].
Since both teams were very interested in following the developments of the German Community Lab scene, we agreed to meet again at the end of our policy & practices project.
Bielefeld-CeBiTec
On the 5th of June, we visited the iGEM Team Bielefeld. While having coffee and cake, each team presented their project followed by a little discussion and receiving feedback.
We were fortunate to get valuable ideas concerning using our pumps in microfluidics. As a consequence, we adjusted the design of our devices and customized the control program software to support this field of application.
Some weeks later, we could return the favor:
Team Bielefeld was searching for different sources of water to test their genetically engineered machine. Therefore, we took two samples, one from a pont in a parc of our city and an additional sample from the famous warm sulfurous terrestrial spring, which was already the favourite place of Charlemagne the founder of Aachen.
Cooperation with industry
Sunfire
The sunfire company was one of the reasons to go for our project. We first met them at the researchcenter in Jülich, where they convinced us with their efficient technical conversion of CO2 and water to Methanol and other fuels. With such an efficienty, area independend way to get a sustainable, high energy chemical, it was a natural decision to find a way to integrate it into the bioeconomy.
Cargill
Early in the project we visited a production plant of Cargill. They process around 2.000 tonnes of maize each day.
There main products are starch, sugar and a prestep of vitamin C. We got an excellent impression of the current starch industry in europe and globally, inkluding resources, prices, products and customers.
Though they were interested in our project, they didn't want to sponsor us because of the difficult reputation of genetic engineering especially in the food industry.
However, they helped us with all our questions regarding the starch industry throughout the project.
Stora Enzo
We got into contact with the paper industry through the MedLife network. As on of the main customers for starch in the industry, they were especially interested in our process. We were visited by two employees of Stora Enso, Heiner Grussenmeyer (chemical process engineering) and Kathrin Berger (paper manufactoring). We discussed the properties of paper starch and possible collaborations. They offered us to test our produced glycogen if it is suitable for the paper industry. Unfortunately, we didn't get any results before the jamboree.
MedLife
Located in Aachen, there is a Life Sciences network called MedLife. Resulting from the fusion of a biotechnological and a biomedical network, the represent several memebers from the industry and universal research. Together with several partners they especially support Start ups but also global player like Bayer or Philips. We started to collaborate with them to get contact to possible sponsors, but soon recognized the immense greater potential. With their support, we could not only find new applications for our product, but also found a great way to connect community labs with other partners in the Life Science. They even invited us to their smmer event, where we met a lot of interesting people and partner for the future.
Celebration
Marburg - Meet up
We followed the invitation of the iGEM Team Marburg and went for their Meet up with six students of our team. During the weekend we had a lot of fun meeting the other iGEM Teams, racing in canoes and enjoying a great barbecue and music. Of course we also talked a lot about the project of each team and tried to support other teams as good as possible. Many collaborations were turned up during the Meet up. One of them was the collaboration with Team Göttingen.
iGEM Team Amsterdam
Since the iGEM Team Amsterdam and we are tackling the same problem, we decided to visit them and have a look at their solution. During the few hours we spend with them, we got to know a very likeable team that did a great job in working out their solution.
Team Mexico
Roger was here
Celebrating the Success of the iGEM Team Sumbawagen 2014
Follow up of last year´s collaboration between Aachen and Sumbawagen
During the 2014 Giant Jamboree it came to our attention that iGEM Team Sumbawagen was in need of a fluorescence detector to finalize their project.
Part of our project in 2014 was the development of a low budget Do-It-Yourself device for measurement of optical density (OD) as well as fluorescence, the OD/F device, which would have perfectly matched their needs.
A collaboration was thus established between both teams to ship one of the OD/F devices to team Sumbawagen´s University in Indonesia.
This year’s iGEM Team Aachen 2015 continued this collaboration by assembling an OD/F device, calibrating it and finally shipping the device to team Sumbawagen.