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Revision as of 09:07, 17 September 2015

Collaboration

Stockholm

Skyping with the Stockholm team

Our first contacts with other teams started together with 2014 Aalto-Helsinki team, as university students from Stockholm building a new iGEM team from scratch contacted Aalto-Helsinki. In one of the very first meetings of the Aalto-Helsinki 2015 team we had a Skype session together with Aalto-Helsinki 2014 and the new Stockholm team. We first exchanged ideas with Stockholm and Aalto-Helsinki 2014 gave them advice in starting a completely new team. We kept close contacts with the Stockholm iGEM team throughout the summer, often having Skype sessions for updates on both teams' progress and for sharing experiences and ideas.

We were eager to meet the Stockholm team already before the Giant Jamboree, and were strongly supportive of expanding the planned Swedish iGEM meetup to a Nordic iGEM Conference, which was indeed realized in Uppsala in the end of July. On our way to the conference, we visited the Stockholm iGEM team lab at the AlbaNova University Center and met with the team. Our wonderful guide Sarah from the Stockholm team also kindly gave us a tour around the Royal Institute of Technology and Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

Both of our teams recognized a need for better collaboration tools for iGEM teams. This led us to working on a collaboration platform, the HumHub, which team Stockholm put up. Together with them, we wrote a report on this platform, how we used it, what it could be and what we felt were its pros and cons. The whole report can be read on our HumHub report page.

Sarah from Stockholm team showing us around in their iGEM lab, Karolinska Institutet and Royal Institute of Technology.

Nordic iGEM Conference

Presenting at Nordic iGEM Conference 2015

The Nordic iGEM Conference (NiC) was held in Uppsala 24-26.7 Hosted by Uppsala and Stockholm iGEM teams, it was a really superb event, strengthening the Nordic iGEM community. It was really cool to meet and get to know seven other iGEM teams from across the Nordic region and hear about their projects. Besides the hosting teams and us, participants included teams Linköping, Chalmers-Gothenburg, UI Oslo, Copenhagen and SDU Denmark.The NiC also gave us a great chance to practice for the Giant Jamboree, as we held a 12-minute presentation on our project, followed by questions from the audience and the jury, formed by members from each participating team. The Uppsala and Stockholm teams had also prepared interesting workshops for the event, as well as great evening events, including a dinner and a welcoming BBQ, where our team also got to organize a get-to-know-each-other activity for participants.

A group photo from the Nordic iGEM Conference, hosted by Uppsala and Stockholm teams, with 8 nordic teams participating.

Cooperation with other teams

While Stockholm was perhaps the team closest to us not only geographically, we also had contacts to many other iGEM teams.

In the beginning of the summer, we skyped with team Pasteur from Paris, exchanging thoughts on fundraising and talking about our project ideas, among other things.

Early on but with our idea picked, we also contacted Scottish teams from Dundee and Edinburgh, presenting our projects to each other. We especially discussed the approaches and issues our teams had in modeling.

The HS Slovenia team had a biofuel project just like us, and we emailed each other a lot, as well as had a Skype session to discuss our projects and whether we could find ways to help each other. Indeed, this cooperation resulted in us sending one of our new BioBricks to them for validation.

Questionnaires

Questionnaires of different sorts are a part of many iGEM teams projects, ourselves included. We created two questionnaires, the first one on the integration of modeling and wetlab efforts in iGEM and the second one on finding collaboration partners. Having ourselves approached the iGEM community for this purpose, we recognise the difficulties teams sometimes face in getting answers to their surveys. To do our part in solving this problem we wanted to answer and forward as many iGEM questionnaires as possible as well as we could. We answered and/or forwarded the following teams questionnaires:

Team

Topic

Tec-Monterrey

Customs

Stockholm

Negative results and wiki

Aachen

Lab organization

Technion

Male pattern baldness

UI Indonesia

Family planning

Uppsala

Synthetic biology attitudes (forwarded to general public)

York

Wastewater treatment

IIT Kharagpur

Food spoilage

Kent

E. coli-based conductive nanowires

Leicester

iGEM global cooperation

Nankai

iShare information platform

NEFU China

Wiki building

Korea U Seoul

Open research
Table 1: Questionnaires answered/forwarded by Aalto-Helsinki 2015 participants.