Team:ULaval/Collaborations




Collaborations
We collaborated with two teams as part of the Human Practices: Singapore’s A team NUSGEM and Toulouse’s team INSA-UPS. We worked on three aspects of the Human Practices that seemed the most important to us in regards of synthetic biology: bioethics as well as the impact of our projects on the economy and society. See Human Practices.

We collaborated with the iGEM team Dalhousie Halifax NS by summarising a research article as requested. We summarised a recent study describing the developmental delays affecting children born with the congenital Zika syndrome (CZS) during the last Zika virus epidemic in Brazil. As a result of our collaboration, the team Dalhousie will publish selected articles, including ours, on the website Think of the PLOSibilities on October 18th. This web page was created in 2017 in an effort to promote open-access publishing. This publication thus provided the opportunity to inform the public about the social crisis emerging in Brazil and the special care those children are going to need.

We also collaborated with the team UCSC from the University of California Santa Cruz by sharing information and discussing extraction protocols. They suggested to use a riboswitch in order to detect our final products within our cell cultures. We, however, could not find one that allowed this detection for our products. Our team, on the other hand, suggested them to use HPLC to purify and detect their products. We also explained to them how we financed the HPLC column which is quite expensive and how we collaborated with a university laboratory which granted us access to their equipment to perform HPLC. Moreover, their team helped us get public input by sharing our ethical survey and answering it themselves.

We wanted to give the opportunity to the academic community to learn more about synthetic biology and its implications. To do so, we collaborated with UCLouvain to publicly present the conference Biotech4Change that was presented at the European Parliament. We scheduled a viewing session opened to the public on the campus and we were able to watch and interact during the event.

We initiated a collaboration with the team UAlberta from the University of Alberta. We contacted Julia Heaton in the interest of combining our technologies. The UAlberta team designed an adrenaline biosensor and we wished to use it to detect and quantify adrenaline production from our cell cultures. Unfortunately, due to experimental difficulties encountered by their team we could not complete this collaboration.
igem@bcm.ulaval.ca