Team:Nottingham/Collaborations
The University of Warwick
We sent the University of Warwick water samples from our local river- the River Trent. These samples were then tested in their fluorometer and they return the data to our team. This was a very meaningful collaboration, as it gave their team a wider range of results to analyse in their attempts to improve water safety using their flurometer. By having a wider range of data, the team were able to have more confidence in their device and final conclusions. This data can be accessed via this link.
Team BioMarvel- Korea
Our team offered our grammar checking services, as native English speakers to Team BioMarvel for their wiki. We collaborated intensely over the summer months, reviewing their team’s drafts and sending redrafts of their wiki submissions. We edited their drafts over and over until the grammar was perfect! This was an incredibly meaningful collaboration, as it ensured their team had an outstanding wiki, with accurate grammar. This ensured that regardless of English not being their first language, their efforts in iGEM could still be fully recognised and understood with a grammatically correct wiki.
The University of Warwick and Imperial College London
We sent 8 samples of our promoters, including a negative control, with the same 3 day protocol we followed for our GFP assay. Please find a link to the protocol below.
The data we acquired through this collaboration emphasises the importance of the standardised approach that iGEM promotes through their inter lab study, as both teams used the same standardised method as us and all achieved similar results. This increases our confidence in our data, and reassures us of our decision to use PCac_thl in our constructs.
Oxford iGEM meetup
Nottingham iGEM 2018 participated in the UK iGEM Meetup. This was one of the best opportunities to make collaborations with other teams and bring back useful information that we gained during 2 days in Oxford on 12th-13th July 2018.
The first day was very interesting! We got an opportunity to present our project, answer questions and get feedback from other iGEM teams. This was very useful as it helped our team to understand what type of question the jury might ask at the Giant Jamboree. As well as this, we took part in a collaboration workshop. It was a great chance to meet other teams, discuss our projects and also make collaborations, which is a very important part of iGEM.
The next morning, we started with a short introduction of activities. We were split into 3 groups and started our lecture sessions. The first one was called “The iGEM Alumni Trouble-shooting Workshop”, where we focused on our problems and shared our iGEM experiences so far. This helped us to understand how other teams are doing and gain advice from last year’s winners and alumni. Then we had a lecture on human practices, safety and security. This lecture was extremely important because it helped our team to understands the concept of human practices and gave us some tips about how to avoid mistakes in the safety and security part of iGEM. The final lecture was about entrepreneurship. This helped us to look at our project from another perspective and learn about the After iGEM potential for our team.
Hassan, Sofya and Nemira were brainstorming a lot during these two days, so we came back to Nottingham full of different ideas about what we can do or change. We presented these thoughts to the rest of our team, who had even more ideas!
To conclude, we found the meetup incredibly useful and informative. We learned, plus collaborated with so many different teams and loved getting to know more about each other’s different projects. We look forward to implementing the skills and knowledge that we learned in Oxford very soon!
