Human Practices: iGEM WashU

Team WashU is working towards engineering yeast to produce a wheat rust resistance protein. As a collaboration activity, they expected to collect responses from variety of wheat farmers across the world. We helped them with relevant data from India. During one of our IHP visits, our team interacted with wheat farmers and collected responses to the specific questions sent by the WashU team. Team also provided the contacts of some farmers in India as part of the collaboration activity, thus helping them to improve their network of farmers and gain information about specifics of damage caused by wheat rust and their preventive measures.

Modelling and distance from Jamboree: iGEM Tec Monterrey

Before going to actual in vitro studies, we wanted to check how our design of oscillatory circuit works in silico. We had already prepared a stochastic model of the circuit, but we wanted to verify it from experts. We had a discussion with iGEM Tec Monterrey to discuss about the project earlier in this iGEM Season and they helped us out with our modelling. They verified our program and equations for us, and suggested the concepts such as leakage transcription which we missed to take into account. Their help was very valuable in terms of refinement of modelling of our initial circuit design. Even though we were not able to gather the experimental data and decided to go about designing a different circuit altogether, conversations with iGEM Tec Monterrey were highly informative and educative for our modelling experience.


In the second collaboration activity, Tec de Monterrey Campus Guadalajara sent out requests to make a sign that said how far we were from Giant jamboree (Boston) in km along with the phrase #ScienceEverywhere. Then they wanted us to take a picture of one of our team members holding the sign board and send it to them. Our PI, Dr. Shalini Deb and Dr. Suruchi Rao performed this fun activity at the David Sassoon Library, a heritage site in Colaba, Mumbai.

Language Project: IIT-Madras

Team IIT-Madras is working towards spreading awareness about synthetic biology to as many people as possible, disregarding the barriers of their native language. To do so they have created a series of educational videos which they have translated to many regional languages for people all over the world. In collaboration with them, we contributed by translating their videos to Marathi and Urdu, two commonly spoken languages in our country, India. It was a fun and enriching experience! Find the Urdu video hereand Marathi video here.

Science Sketch: NYU Abu Dhabi

NYU Abu Dhabi came up with the very creative idea of explaining the concepts and applications of synthetic biology to the world using simple, interactive animated sketches. They aimed at making a collaborative educational playlist with videos from teams all over the world, with the science sketches explaining about their projects and/or the scientific principle behind their project. Towards this collaboration, we made our very own sketch video describing our project and its applications.

Human Practices: IISER Mohali

Collaboration with IISER Mohali was focused on sharing valuable local information pertaining to our project. IISER Mohali gave us information about the farms, type of crops grown, amount of fertilizers used by farmers and common diseases seen in crops. They also informed us about the knowledge of phosphate solubilizing bacteria in the farming circle. They asserted that plant disease is not a problem for farmers but weeds are. Also they informed us that there is no knowledge of phosphate solubilizing bacteria among farmers. Their knowledge was indeed helpful in our project.

Displaying our project on a global platform: ECUST China

Wechat Subscription is a platform available to everyone on which we can publish articles called WeChat Push, and Team ECUST is running a subscription about iGEM. Team ECUST in collaboration with us graciously converted our submitted project description to the standard format required by them and published our description as a WeChat Push article. They even translated our article to Chinese. The English version can be found hereand the Chinese version can be found here. In this way, our project reached many people in China.

Showcasing our project and Troubleshooting: IISER-Bhopal

Our team and IISER-Bhopal had a fulfilling collaboration. IISER-Bhopal presented our project at their event: iGEM Day, which aimed to spread awareness about real life world problems and the solutions of different teams around the world. They also helped us with troubleshooting our overlap extension PCR.

Healthy Recipe: iGEM HAFS

Team HAFS is working towards finding optimal solution to diabetes. As a collaboration activity, they expected to collect healthy recipes from all around the world. ICT-Mumbai participated in this activity. We shared the recipe of 'Beetroot Raita', which is very commonly prepared in Maharashtrian households. The main ingredient, 'beetroot, has been found to have many health benefits such as lowering blood sugar, detoxification to name a few. This very easy to make, and very tasty at the same time, recipe was an excellent contribution to the healthy recipe initiative of iGEM team HAFS.

Mike the Microbe: Team US AFRL CarrollHS

Team US AFRL CarrollHS had designed 2 bacterium cartoons called “Mike the Microbe” and his friend “Chia the Chitanase”, they requested us to print the two microbes and take our pictures with them. It was fun taking pictures with the two.

Funniest Failure Experience: FUDAN-China

This year Team Fudan requested us to share the “funniest failure Experience in our experiments” to design their comic brochure aimed to add amusement to lab work and to remind everyone not to make such mistakes. We shared our funniest moment with them.

Surveys

Team iGEM ICT-Mumbai completed the following surveys as a part of collaboration activity: