Collaborations

Part of the project was also to share experiences with other teams from all over the world. These experiences were partly active and partly just participation. Collaborations helped us create a network of interacting students and teams that taught us what is the meaning of an active scientific community. After all, what makes a discovery or an experience beautiful is being able to share it.

BioBrick Tutorial DTU

DTU Biobuilders, DTU University, Denmark

In April, DTU Biobuilders, iGEM team from the Technical University of Denmark, invited us and other teams from Sweden, Norway and Denmark to participate to a BioBrick tutorial: a three day event in which we learnt how to build a BioBrick both in theory and in the lab and we also had the opportunity to exchange opinions about other topics. In particular:

• We worked in the lab with the BioBricks, we combined three genes into a plasmid by digestion, ligation and transformation in E.coli.
• We had talks about the iGEM Interlab Study: the largest international biology research project, by three alumni who talked about their experiences in iGEM, and one about Human Practices.
• We had a workshop on how to pitch our iGEM project.
• We had a talk with Abigail from iGEM HQ about after iGEM.

Nordic iGEM Conference in Lund

iGEM Lund, Lund University, Sweden

The Nordic iGEM Conference is hosted annually and serves as a meeting point for all the Nordic iGEM teams. It is important as teams get to meet other iGEM competitors to exchange ideas, knowledge, and discuss potential collaborations. It is hosted by the previous year's winners of the conference. iGEM Lund, being the 2017 winners, have received the honor of hosting the 2018 event. The NiC serves the purpose of gathering and preparing the Nordic teams for The Giant Jamboree event in Boston. In the conference, we had the opportunity to present our project and we also had a poster session.

Postcards

iGEM Duesseldorf, Heinrich-Heine University, Germany

We designed a postcard containing something characteristic about the project and a small description. The scope of this collaboration was to exchange postcards with teams from all over the world discovering easily about projects we didn’t know about and using those postcards to spread information about synthetic biology and iGEM.

DH5 alpha cells

iGEM Lund, Lund University, Sweden

We gave to iGEM Lund the DH5-Alpha Cells, E. coli cells that are used for maximizing the transformation efficiency. We plated them in LB and deliver them to their University. We believe that this kind of collaborations, in which teams exchange materials, are very useful because we save a lot of money and time and we understand the value of sharing and cooperating with other researchers.

Engineered Probiotics Around the World

Unesp Brazil, School of Pharmaceutical Science, Unesp, Brazil

The purpose of this collaboration was to exchange opinions about how engineered probiotics are regulated all around the world. By regulation we mean laws, trials, startups etc. After having thoroughly searched these information for the swedish and european countries, we wrote a document containing a summary and we sent it to Unesp Brazil Team. They will share with us what they learnt at the end of the iGEM period.

Attempting Science

iGEM Linkoping, Linköping University, Sweden

This year, the swedish iGEM Team form Linköping invited other teams to their University to discuss their projects and biology in general, during a podcast session. They have several episodes that they uploaded on youtube, and we, iGEM Chalmers, participated in the 4th episode. Watch here

Accessible Wiki

iGEM Marburg, Marburg University, Germay

The purpouse of this collaboration was to cooperate with iGEM Maburg and other teams from other Universities to make our wiki pages more accessible for people with disabilities. In particular, we used the function -alt in our code to have an alternative text coupled with the images, in this way, blind people who usually listen the page will have a description of the images that are in the wiki.