Collaborations

With the extensive support we receive from Mindfuel’s geekStarter program, many collaborations were made possible this year, both with High school and Collegiate iGEM teams. Three different Mindfuel events were held in the last year, which brought the following teams together to share our ideas and project successes, and to troubleshoot and support one another with stumbling blocks:

• Notre Dame Collegiate iGEM
• Lethbridge High School iGEM
• University of Calgary iGEM
• University of Calgary BioMod
• University of Lethbridge iGEM
• University of Alberta iGEM

Through these meaningful collaboration events, we got to know other students working in Synthetic Biology and made meaningful connections with other experts and mentors in the field. In particular, we are grateful to have met the U of Alberta iGEM team, who worked with Dr. Robert E. Campbell, who was an expert in mCherry, and provided us with a sample of purified mCherry lysate for our spectrophotometric assays!

We had hoped to connect more closely with the Tianjin 2016 iGEM team members since our PET-hydrolase constructs were intended to be modifications and improvements upon their excellent work. Unfortunately, we did not get any responses from our emails or social media outreach to Tianjin 2016, and so we were not able to collaborate with them.

Our team at a geekStarter kickoff workshop in December