Team:IISc-Bangalore/Collaborations

Collaborations

Mentoring IISER-Kolkata

For a team participating in the competition for the first time, IISER-Kolkata got in touch with us much before the announcement for iGEM 2018 came in. At that time, the later to-be members of these teams were busy with their project work at the National Center for Biological Sciences in Bangalore. The talk about iGEM started more or less over lunch when the topic of BioBricks came up.

Since then, we have been in constant contact regarding both lab work and administration on how to go about running the team. Being from an Institute from where teams have been participating for two years in a row, IISc-Bangalore was in the right position to mentor IISER-Kolkata with the knowledge we had gained from our predecessors. The interaction was especially valuable because it provided a more regional outlook on the issues we were facing and how we could go about solving them. From financial issues like how to go about submitted the registration fees to tips regarding cloning, the interaction shaped a large part of both the teams’ project work.

Organizing the All-India iGEM Meetup

A very important part of iGEM is the kind of interaction local teams have amongst themselves before they go for the Jamboree. Being from the same country we usually have similar problems relating to logistics and lab supplies.

This year, the IISc-Bangalore iGEM team organised the meetup where six other teams from the country participated and discussed their projects. The meetup itself was a mix of fun activities and presentations. This was followed by a poster presentation on the last day where the teams got feedback from the audience regarding their posters. A more strict analysis was done by two judges who graded the posters on multiple criteria. This feedback was sent to the teams after the meetup. Mr. Hassnain, the iGEM ambassador for Asia also joined us on the last day of the meetup to discuss after iGEM.

Other than IISc-Bangalore, the following teams participated in the meetup: IISER-Bhopal-India, VIT_Vellore, IIT-Madras, ICT-Mumbai, REC-Chennai and IISER-Kolkata.

Problems ranging from getting VISAs to the intricacies of overlap extension were discussed over a cup of tea. As such, the meetup proved to be an important learning experience for both us, as hosts, as well as for the other teams.





Working with phages: A primer

During the course of our project, we felt that the use of phages as a target for genetic engineering is sparsely documented compared to more frequently used model organisms like E. coli. As such, the amount of literature review that we had to undertake for successful execution of even simple protocols was enormous.

To make sure no other teams face similar problems in the future, we decided to draft this document as a guideline for working with phages in a laboratory equipped with basic molecular biology machinery.

TecCEM “Labs Like you” collaboration

While hard work is integral for a team to succeed in iGEM, fun is also something we have to consider every once in a while. This time it happened in the form of a collaboration with the TecCEM iGEM team. Teams from all around the world participated in a dance parody of Maroon 5 songs 'Girls like you' and 'Moves like Jagger' made by the TecCEM iGEM team.

Including IISc-Bangalore, around 30 teams participated in the video.