From the start Vidilab has been a loyal partner; giving us not only information about the problem that needs solving but also with the equipment needed for RNA sequencing. In addition, they sponsored us with financial support in order to further the field of veterinary diagnostics.

Vidilab has throughout the summer been kind enough to provide us with fecal samples. This company has been a bridge between us and horse owners, giving us invaluable contacts and sharing our market analysis.

Since 2017, iGEM Uppsala and iGEM Stockholm have been collaborating to host panel discussions. This year we have evolved the concept making it a science symposium with two sessions, the first about how to maintain a healthy mental state while working in science and the second about biohacking. What’s also new is that Lund has also joined the event and the work in arranging it. The work started in June and we starting having meetings in early July, with a session every second week. The symposium was held at Uppsala University in late September where students, professors and previous iGEM participants attended. You can find more information about the event on the human practices page!

Furthermore, iGEM Uppsala and iGEM Stockholm have had a close relationship this year and held several social events together such as BBQs.

The iGEM team from UC Louvain has kindly distributed our market analysis form in several Belgian horse community forums. In exchange we have been helping them by trying to find the source of error in why their interlab data didn’t get accepted by sharing our advice from our personal experience with the Interlab protocol.

This year one of the project managers along with 8 of the team members attended the DTU Biobrick Tutorial. A great event arranged to introduce many of the nordic teams to each other to create a great starting point for future collaborations. Nevertheless, the Biobuilder weekend also brought some great opportunities to practice transformation which made it especially valuable for early year students and students that never performed transformed before. In general we found the registry tutorials and the information about the InterLab study very useful since we before the event had a lot of questions about it. In addition we got the possibility to meet our headquarters contact Abigail Sison. All of the teams attending the event along with the hosts DTU-Denmark was University of Cophenhagen, Linkoping University, Stockholm, Lund, Chalmers-Gothenburg.

More than half of the team managed to attend this years Nordic iGEM Conferance hosted by Lund. This turned out to be a great oppertunity to reconnect to the nordic iGEM community that we met earlier in spring. It was very useful since all the teams shared advice among each other in the purpose of making all nordic teams better. Most of all, it was a huge opportunity to get a taste of the feeling of being at the Giant Jamboree since all teams had to present their project with a poster and a presentation to later be judged. All teams participating along with our hosts, Lund, was: Aalto Helsinki, Uppsala, Stockholm, Linkoping University, Chalmers-Gothenburg, Lund, University of Oslo, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Technical Univeristy.

As a part of our subproject with the booklet, this year's human practice group have created a form to evaluate the work environment in the iGEM competition. In order to get as many representative answers possible, we posted the evaluation form on the iGEM collaboration page and let iGEM teams worldwide answer our questions. Several teams chose to collaborate with us by filling in the form and we could not have completed the evaluation without their answers. This gave us valuable content for the booklet and a broader perspective of how extensive the problem of burning out is for iGEM participants. However, we want to continue this investigation and would be thankful if even more teams would like to answer this survey . Help us build a better iGEM environment!