Collaborations

We have collaborated with several iGEM teams, sharing experiences and problems we have faced during the development of our project. In the following, we described each of our partnerships.

Cooperation with UFSCAR Team

Bioinformatics and modeling seems to always be challenging for most of us. This year, we wanted to create a supplementary material that summarizes useful tools to analyze data, simulate synthetic circuits and give us prediction power. Click here to learn more about this material.

On July 3rd, we met with UFSCar-Brasil team to talk about modeling of biological systems, and present a supplementary material we developed as a didactic introduction to these topics. Thiago, the physicist of our team, compiled these topics into a 2 hours talk with hands-on activities. We conducted an informal discussion about Python and the main tools in this programming language for Synthetic Biology, reviewing state-of-art numerical methods for bioinformatics and gene expression simulation through deterministic models. We believe this interaction provided us with constructive feedback to improve our material, while hopefully helping UFSCar-Brasil team with modeling.

Participation in a survey from Team CGU_Taiwan

iGEM projects often address timely and appealing issues that could potentially raise our quality of life. However, the actual impact of an iGEM project depends on how the public opinion will see your project. For instance, we are all constantly struggling for financial support, which strongly depends on how appealing a solution would be perceived by the general population. Thinking of this topic, The CGU Taiwan team wanted to create (created) a survey to assess the feedback to several iGEM project descriptions from populations of differents countries. This could generate significant information on how to propose better projects in the future.

To this end, CGU Taiwan approached several teams asking for simple questions related to their own project. Then, all questions were presented to people from different countries, with significant different backgrounds. We have contributed with two questions:

How long does it take for one regular tire, the one used in our cars, to degrade if left in an open environment? Is tire disposal regulated in your country? If yes, are these laws able to control correct disposal and recycling of rubber waste?

To help them share this survey with in Brazil, we have translated it into portuguese. Visit CGU Taiwan team’s wiki to learn more about the answers to these questions and the overall feedback on our project.

Contributed to Modeling-Experimentation quizz from Team Aalto-Helsinki

The scientific method is based on a closed loop between experimentation and analytical reasoning (modeling) on the data. While both are completely indispensable, there is a historical segregation between experimentation and modeling in natural sciences, probably due to a natural background divergence among different scientists. Team Aalto-Helsinki proposed a survey to investigate how most of iGEM team members see this issue and how each team is tackling the experimenting-modeling discrepancy. Visit Aalto-Helsinki to learn more about this survey!

A few members of our team answered this poll. In particular, we are very happy that we could arrange a group of team members dedicated to modeling and bioinformatics. This group was in close connection with the Wet Lab, always keeping the Experimenting-Modeling cycle closed and working.

Participating in a survey from Paris-Saclay team

Participating and sharing a survey from UCL

Skype calls

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