Team:Stockholm/Collaborations

Collaborations

Inter-team collaboration is one of many exciting things about the iGEM community. Throughout our project, we have collaborated with many different iGEM teams around the world. We did not only benefit from each other’s expertise through collaborating, but we also formed invaluable bonds with many teams around the world, boosting the team’s creativity. With this in mind, we would like to thank all the iGEM teams who have collaborated and shared ideas with us.

iGEM BOKU Vienna

After attending a lecture about Pichia pastoris at KTH hosted by Professor Diethard Mattanovich, we got introduced to the iGEM team of BOKU-Vienna 2018. Being their primary PI, Professor Mattanovich helped us getting into contact with the team and their secondary PI Hans Marx, who we talked to about technical issues we encountered while working with P. pastoris. The team further offered to clone our laccase sequences into their expression vector for P. pastoris so we sent them our constructs.

BioBrick Tutorial

In April, we were invited for a weekend of Biobrick tutorials, organized by DTU Copenhagen Biobuilders. The aim was to learn more about how to work with BioBricks, and to perform 3A assembly. The event was a splendid opportunity for us to meet other Nordic teams, and it led to us getting into contact with iGEM Uppsala and iGEM Lund, which we later did a collaboration with. See the event "Limits of Life" on the Public Engagement page.

NiC- conference

This year, iGEM Lund was hosting the annual Nordic iGEM Conference, NiC. The conference was held in the beginning of June, and gave all the Nordic iGEM teams the opportunity to pitch their project idea. We were able to meet the friends that we made in the BioBrick tutorial in Copenhagen, but also to form new friendships. The conference included a poster session and a presentation, and we got valuable feedback from the judges and our newly found peers. Read more about it on the Public Engagement page.

iGEM Uppsala

After our participation in the annual Nordic iGEM Conference (NiC) held in Lund, we decided to meet iGEM Uppsala again during the summer to discuss a possible collaboration. To serve our great interest in public engagement and education, we came up with the idea of hosting a panel discussion. The event was called "Limits of Life” and aimed to tackle two essential aspects within the field of synthetic biology; the limits of scientist health & well-being, and the limits of biohacking. For this event, iGEM Lund was also involved in planning and executing the event. The event was a success, and it was able to captivate people from all educational backgrounds, even people who studied humanities. People left the event feeling more interested in the field of synthetic biology and what iGEM is. We had great contact with iGEM Uppsala during the summer, and we had two BBQs together during the summer, to get to know each other better.

iGEM USP-EEL-Brazil

In mid-September, iGEM USP-EEL-Brazil contacted us after reading our project description about degrading antibiotics in wastewater. Working with degradation of endocrine disrupters (EDCs) from water bodies using engineered laccases, USP EEL Brazil are relevant to our project in solving the growing environmental problems in wastewater. After our Skype meeting, we started a collaboration by exchanging the outcomes of our visits to different wastewater treatment plants in our own countries. With this knowledge, we were able to compare how the Nordic and South American regions treat their wastewater, and where they differ.

iGEM Warwick

At the beginning of September, we hosted a Skype call with iGEM Warwick whose interest lies in the detection of Legionella, detoxification of estrogen from water bodies and removal of lead from water with floating bioremediation bacteria. We talked about similarities and differences in our projects approaches. Besides sharing an interest in solving the rising problems in water purification, we noticed that our Human Practices outreach strategies focused on bringing the fun of synthetic biology to children. iGEM Warwick helped us to distribute our children’s book on several events in the UK. Furthermore, we created a "Synbio for Kids Guide" to give future iGEM teams a supportive booklet at hand, filled with tools and strategies in how to teach synthetic biology to children. Together, we hope to not only spread the word of synthetic biology to young future aspiring scientists but also joy through our iGEM meme collaboration. Recently we made a Facebook group open for Jamboree participants, a place to unleash our creativity and share our love for memes. This we believe will also give people the opportunity to meet before the Jamboree, and help us feel more relaxed during the competition.

iGEM University of La Verne

We read about iGEM University of La Verne (ULV) and their project on the Team collaborations website. Since they were investigating toxicants like us, we were interested to hear how they gathered information and investigated the problem. We contacted them to exchange information and discuss our projects. iGEM ULV was very helpful in providing information about the severeness of our projects by reaching out to nearby wastewater treatment plants. Since ULV also used molecular modeling, we sent them our handbook created for other iGEM teams, to guide them on how to analyse and interpret their models.

Ocean University of China (OUC) iGEM

As our own Human Practices team focused on developing tools to communicate synthetic biology, we stumbled across a comic project produced by OUC. We contacted them and asked if we could participate in their project by translating it into Swedish. We hope this collaboration will make it easier for them to reach out in society, and that synthetic biology will become more accessible to everyone.