We met the Bordeaux iGEM team at both the French and European meetups. They were trying to find a way to substitute an alternative segment of the traditional petrobased chemistry by a new green bio-based chemistry. Cellulose was a possible substrate for them and they were especially interested about pure bacterial cellulose. We therefore engaged in producing sufficient bacterial cellulose for them. Our initial production rate was not designed for that so we had to improve our production capacity to match their requirement. We were very pleased when we visited them in Bordeaux from the 24th to the 26th of August to give them 5g of beautiful bacterial cellulose so they could test their project using our material. Best of luck guys !

Human Practices Collaborations

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We skyped the ULaval iGEM team during the summer to talk about collaborations. It quickly appeared that a scientific collaboration was going to be difficult because our projects were not connected but the idea of collaborating on human practices seemed great.
Both teams have advisors who were specialists in ethics so we thought about reviewing each other’s HP approach. We had the idea of comparing the point of views of Europeans and North Americans visions about ethics. To complete our study, we asked the National University of Singapore (NUS) iGEM team to join us, so we could also have an Asian point of view.

iGEM France

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Thanks to Grenoble’s initiative, we were honoured to take part in the iGEM France journey. This newly created association aims to promote mutual aid between French teams and exchange on their difficulties.

We had meetings every month through Skype to talk about the role of the association and define projects together to strengthen the connections between French teams. This experience allowed us to contact the teams from Montpellier and Laval (yes, we love french speaking teams!) with whom we have undertaken some great collaborations

Meetups

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4th Parisian Meetup

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On the 4th of July, we gathered with all the french iGEM teams to participate in the 4th Parisian meetup organised by the Pasteur Paris iGEM team.
It was the first time that we presented our project to others and we got the feedback of a jury composed of various professionals. To receive advice from the jury and the other iGEM teams was very interesting and helpful to improve our presentation and our way to communicate about our project.
Seeing everyone’s projects and how they managed to progress gave us an overall idea of what was left to do and where we should put more efforts.
We also got the chance to participate in discussions about bioethics.

European Meetup in Munich

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On the 21st and 22nd of July, we attended the European Meetup in Munich.
The different talks were highly interesting and we had the chance to ask Katrin Lang, one of the speaker, for advice about the unnatural amino acid part of our platform.
The poster session was a great opportunity to practice the presentation of our project to the other teams. The feedback and tips we received from the other teams were very helpful to improve our poster for the oncoming events.
This meetup was also a good opportunity to talk about collaborations and to get to know each other by spending time with the other teams.

Montpellier iGEM Team

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Their project is called Vagineering, and it looks to solve hormonal contraceptive issues with a novel, non-hormonal method. The goal is to create a lasting contraceptive using only bacteria, which can later be reversed by engineering the strain with a kill-switch.

Montpellier participates for the first time in the iGEM competition! We wanted to help them since our two cities are neighbours. We visited Montpellier at the beginning of our adventure. It was a great opportunity for our two teams to build relationships and think together about a collaborative project. After several exchanges we decided to start a collaboration around the LL-37 (a human antibiotic of the class of cathelicidins). Our ultimate goal was to clone LL-37 with an AviTag to be biotinylated in Pichia pastoris. The big idea was to use our Cerberus platform in the Montpellier project and include a new functionalisation of cellulose. We had a second project whose goal was to prove the biological activity of scygonadin on the vaginal flora.

Postcard Project

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We took part in Duesseldorf’s project to exchange postcards about synthetic biology.

We decided to have a photo of our city, Toulouse, on the front and a world map on the back with Toulouse marked by a dog’s paw as a reminder of our mascot Cerberus.

iGEM Team Worldwide

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This year, we shared with other teams an instagram account that we created: igem.teams.worldwide. The team managing this account changed every week. Thus all participating teams were able to discover the daily life of the other teams. We are very happy with the contribution of so many teams around the world to this project.

Surveys

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We filled out surveys for the following teams:

• Bielefeld: questionnaire about Dual Use and Dual Use Research of Concern
• Bordeaux: Human practices survey
• Duesseldorf: survey iGEM Duesseldorf 2018
• Lund: iGEM workplace evaluation
• Montpellier: project Vagineering
• Pasteur Paris: NeuronArch : prothèse, infection et interface… la biologie de synthèse au service du progrès
• Uppsala: iGEM work environment evaluation