During the last weekend of August, Bordeaux hosted the french meetup with the help of Capsciences (Scientific Museum in Bordeaux). Unfortunately, some teams couldnt assist but IGEM Leuven , EPLF Lausanne, Paris Saclay , Paris Paster , Aix Marseille and Toulouse came and enjoyed that moment with us. Teams presented their projects in front of other teams and general public at Capsciences and we talked about the inconvenient and advantages of each project. We also were lucky to have a theatre expert who gave us constructive feedback on the best way to present our projects at Boston and to a non-scientific public. Paris Saclay organized a debate about biosafety, and prepared a video for each iGEM team presentation. This encouraged all teams to think about safety considerations in their project and allowed us to discuss general safety issues such as containing genetically modified organisms and ensuring that they do not become out of our control. Afterwards, we had a discussion about Paris Pasteur's project and answered their Survey in order to help them with their project. Finally iGEM Bordeaux organized a scavenger hunt, the objective was to answer question about biology and igem projects and visit the beautiful city of Bordeaux!
The Oxford team of 2015 has generously proposed to help us to establish a short toxicology review of our Curdlan molecule. Our lab does not have the required material to do so and this would help complete our project. So we sent them a sample of our produced Curdlan so they could do tests on it.
When talking with Paris-Sacclay during our meetup we were very interested in their project this year which is concerned about safety. Safety in our project is not a particular problem since we are using our genetically modified organisms for production and all cells are destroyed during Curdlan purification. However, when thinking about alternatives where our bacteria would be directly applied on grapevine leaves, these safety issues are extremely important. We spent some time with them during the meetup and afterwards thinking about Safety of our project.
Throughout the year, we have been contacted to answer surveys and to share surveys. We answered to the best of our abilities all of the following surveys: UI-Indonesian , UCL , TEC-Monterry. When possible we gave feedback to improve their surveys. We also participated in Paris-Bettencourt's rhizi project