While both the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have sent multiple teams to participate in iGEM over the years, most of the interactions have been informal and ad hoc. For the first time, in 2018, Singapore has three iGEM teams participating in this year competition. The three teams that will be representing Singapore this year: NTU-Singapore, NUS Singapore-A (NUS Engineering) and the last being ourselves.

As part of the networking and to foster collaboration, the NUS Singapore-Science iGEM team initiated and hosted an iGEM Singapore 2018 Meet-up on June, 2018. We invited team from NUS Engineering and NTU to come over and mingle with our team over light refreshment. After some friendly chat over pizza kindly provided by NUS Singapore-A, we got down to serious discussion during which we discussed about our projects and possible areas of collaboration in human practices, modelling as well as wet lab. While the vastly different projects we have committed ourselves to made modelling and wet lab collaborations difficult, some possible points of collaboration was suggested in the human practices side.

All in all, this iGEM Singapore Meet-up allowed all of us to get a sense of what the other teams' projects were about, and have fruitful discussion on areas where we could help each other. We hope to continue this meet-up over the following years, as we expect more and more teams to represent Singapore in iGEM.

We also helped multiple teams with translating their Human Practice documents and videos to other languages to further help their outreach. Below are the teams we collaborated with.

We also collaborated with Team EPFL on a survey to understand how the people in our countries, Switzerland and Singapore, have possible different understandings and thoughts regarding the CRISPR system and the ethical issues it raises. The full report is available here