Collaborations with other teams

1) Meetup with Botchan_Lab_Tokyo

私たちはBotchan_Lab_Tokyoを3/10に京都へ招待し、互いのチームの暫定プロジェクトやiGEM活動の進め方についてプレゼンをして意見を交換しました。主に組織体制、資金獲得方法　fundraising、ヒューマンプラクティス、コラボレーションに関して議論した。We invited Team Botchan_Lab_Tokyo to Kyoto, and exchanged our opinions about each putative project and the way of iGEM activities. We especially discussed the below components.Botchan_Lab_Tokyoは、総務課など私たちにはない部門まで細分化して活動を効率化していたのでとても参考になりました。 また、互いの財政状況も教え合いました。私たちはどのようにクラウドファンディング先を見つけるかをBotchan_Lab_Tokyoに教え、Botchan_Lab_Tokyoからは彼らの支援を受け取るコツを教えてもらいました。また、Botchan_Lab_TokyoはiGEM出場2回目なので、クライテリアをどう満たしていくべきかをはっきりわかっていなかったため、教えました。彼らは中高生にサイエンス実験をしていましたが、合成生物学の普及には及んでいなかったため、レクチャーやDNA workをより取り入れることで中高生に合成生物学について考えてもらうとよいのでは、とアドバイスしました。また、コラボレーションの機会を探していたのでMeetupのページの存在を教えたり、アジアカンファレンスへの出席を提案しました。数少ない日本チームとiGEMに関して話せて刺激的だった、ありがとう、Botchan_Lab_Tokyo

2) Aachenからのアドバイス

Hosted by our team, we invited Japanese iGEM teams to the Kansai Forum on 19th February 2017. In the forum, each team presented their project progress and team management methods, followed by heated discussions on each other’s project and management methods. Advices and thoughts were exchanged, and it inspired teams as they continued their projects. Here is the questionnaire taken during this forum!

Kobe Collaboration
Nagahama Collaboration
Gifu Collaboration
Botchan_Lab_Tokyo Collaboration
Hokkaido collaboration

3) 6th Asia Pasific conference

On 20th and 21st May 2017, UT-Tokyo hosted an event for Japanese iGEM teams during the school festival of the University of Tokyo, “May Festival”. Participating teams presented their projects and offered advices on other teams’ projects. It provided us with a chance to reassess our presentation in terms of intelligibility and simplicity.
May festival in Tokyo University

4) Meetup with Gifu

Asian iGEM teams gathered together in Taiwan and presented their projects and their progress. After that, we exchanged opinions on each other’s projects.
5th Asia Pacific International Genetically Engineered Machine Conference

5) The exchange of opinions with Taiwan team

After 5th Asia Pacific iGEM Conference, we have contacted Taiwan teams online, and discussed further our projects.

6) Providing Wiki Creation Assisting Software: KELN to iGEM members

Last year, our team developed KELN, a software for easily making HTML codes for tables in lab notebook pages. It is highly useful when making HTML tables for lab notebooks (experimentation results), and we provided the software for Kobe iGEM team. They sent us feedback on the software, and we found some room for improvement. We are currently revising the software. We sincerely thank Kobe team for the pointers. The feedback was as follows:

-Feedback on KELN-

• 1. You kindly gave us a manual for KELN, and it helped us understand how to use it. However, we were a little bit confused which version we should install and how to change members’ name, because the manual was not for the latest version but for the original version.
• 2. We found that KELN was very helpful to write about routine work by using tables. However, we felt that the format is to some extent restricted. For example, we found it a little hard to put comments into a necessary space. It might be better to add some functions so that one can design pages as they want.
• 3. We tried to change some codes so that it would fit out aims. However, even though we installed Eclipse, we couldn’t even run the original code (probably we should construct some settings, because ‘import’ doesn’t work correctly). Of course, it came from the lack of our knowledge. But, we hope you will add some explanation so that other teams like us can change this tool easily.