Team:CCA-San Diego/Collaborations

In order to best find collaborations that matched our project, we read the backgrounds of every team’s wiki, finding teams that were also involved in pollution cleanup, environmental issues or crude oil. One of these teams was NU Kazakhstan, who is also cleaning up oil in their local environment. With NU Kazakhstan, we organized a Skype call. In this Skype call, we talked about our two projects, and compared them, talking about how they were similar in that they both degraded toxic substances, but different because of the methods of doing so. This was helpful for us as we were in the stages of forming our applied design, and hearing their ideas for them helped us build on our sponge idea from last year and create something different.

Another collaboration was with Team Bulgaria-The EureCAST. With them we created an environmental pamphlet, with the goal of spreading awareness about tips to be more sustainable in the lab, but also in life. We want people to be more environmentally conscious, as small lifestyle changes can make a big difference if everyone implements them.

The final collaboration was with Team USP-EEL-Brazil. We asked them if they would like to be apart of our outreach how to video series, which was aimed towards giving new iGEM teams tips and tricks we wish we had learned before starting our competition. Team USP-EEL-Brazil contributed in this video series, adding their own ten minute video to our collection. This was important to us, as we wanted the videos to appeal to international audiences as well as teams of all three levels. Including a high school and undergraduate team, allowed for variety as both our teams had different struggles to overcome and therefore different tips they wanted to include.