2nd Mediterranean meet up

This year the devoted and strongly motivated Aix-Marseille team organized the second Mediterranean meet up in Marseille on the 9th and 10th of August. This second edition was a great opportunity to meet more teams and countries each other and to share about our projects. It was a meetup including poster presentations, to which we invited teams from all the Mediterranean countries. It gave us all an opportunity to make a rehearsal presenting before the Giant Jamboree. This year, 7 teams from Spain and France participated in the meetup: UPF_CRG_Barcelona, Madrid-OLM, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Pasteur_Paris, Paris_Bettencourt, and Montpellier.

Collaborations

Parisian meet up

Our team participated in the 4th Annual Parisian Meetup, organized by Pasteur_Paris. The meetup was attended by all 10 french iGEM teams and included project presentations and workshops. We met many experts with different specialties, including bioethics, who enlightened us and helped us a lot in shaping our breaking bugs project.

Mexico!

A first contact with the Mexican team, Tecnológico de Monterrey, was over Skype. They were interested in water pollution, a critical environmental problem affecting all sorts of different ecosystems and many communities close to natural and polluted water sources. They asked us to help by providing them with water samples from different environments in France so they can analyze them with several techniques in order to make an overview of water pollution for their project.

Postcard Exchange Program

For the second year in a row, we took part in the postcard exchange program organized by team Düsseldorf next to 39 other teams from all over the world. This postcards exchange project was all about promoting synthetic biology to the public, by using postcards that each team designed.

Language Project

The Chinese team OUC-China created a comic book where it describes microbiology aspects to the non-scientific community. They wanted to translate it into several kinds of languages in order to popularize synthetic biology and they proposed us to translate the book into our native language (French). So we jumped on board this interesting educational project, where the team sent us the English script of the comic book and we translated it into French.

Skype Sessions

Despite this important competition within the iGEM itself, access to collaborations between opposing teams has nonetheless served to enrich our notions about our project. We put aside our adversity to allow us to exchange advice, which has been of great mutual benefit to our team. We were able to establish a communication with two teams