COLLABORATION

Tokyo Tech Meetup
August 8, 2018
During the summer, iGEM teams from across Japan attended a meetup held by Tokyo Tech University. The teams attending were KAIT, Bochan lab, Gifu University, Tokyo Tech, and ASIJ. Each team gave a presentation about the progress they made throughout the year. After each presentation, we had a Q&A where many good suggestions were made. The teams further interacted and followed up on the suggestions after the presentations. Our team received a helpful suggestion from the Tokyo Tech and Gifu team about the use of a histidine tag to simplify and speed up the protein purification process and give a more accurate result.

i-GEM Pakistan Video Call
June 2018
During the summer portion of our lab work, we participated in a Skype call with the Pakistan high school iGEM team, known as LACAS Biobots. We explained our projects to each other, took virtual lab tours, and got to know another HS team and the different ways in which various teams work.

Survey to other iGEM teams
We also worked on gathering advice from other iGEM teams using SurveyMonkey. In our survey, we asked a number of questions regarding the use of genetic engineering for medical therapy. From SurveyMonkey, we were able to obtain a wide variety of insight from other countries, including Pakistan and Mexico. Most countries had similar responses, that as long as genetic engineering was not used for aesthetics and was solely used for therapy that their culture and ethics agreed with the practice.