Collaborations

Collaboration with iGEM Toulouse

We met the iGEM Toulouse Team during an “iGEM France” meeting. We were intrigued by their project aim of functionalizing cellulose and, assisted by the short transit time between cities, decided to spark a collaboration. The first meeting was in Montpellier in July where we had a brainstorming session followed by an exchange of war stories of difficult first steps in the lab. Some of their team members had prior experience and helped lead us to useful software programs or general project organizational strategies, while we helped their team with how to structure their wiki. Throughout the summer we maintained an open pipeline of communication, sharing experimental difficulties and insights between teams. I would move this to the end of the Toulouse section and talk about how you put forth an effort to create a joint fundraising project for the mutual French région of Occitanie that, while ultimately unsuccessful this year, may lay the seeds for future financial collaboration opportunities. Over the course of our brainstorming sessions, we realized that there were two interesting, mutually beneficial potential collaborations between our two projects. The first idea focused on using LL-37, one of the peptides with which we were working, as a functionalizable target for Cerberus, the multi-functionalizable cellulose-binding motif of the iGEM Toulouse team. The second idea was to test the biological activity of scygonadine, [an antimicrobial peptide?], on the vaginal flora, as the iGEM Toulouse team was investigating its use in a potential anti-toxic shock tampon."

The goal of the first one is to fix a LL-37 a peptide used in iGEM Montpellier project to Cerberus the protein synthesize by iGEM Toulouse. The goal is to provide evidence for the versatility of the Cerberus protein and to integrated in the “filter” project to prevent dissemination.

The goal of the second experiment is to provide evidence for the biological activity of scygonadine on the vaginal flora as a concept of this part of the project was to design an anti toxic shock tampon.

Collaboration with iGEM Sorbonne Université

After meeting them in Paris we decided to collaborate with some students of Sorbonne University team. We decided to help them continue with a project the previous Sorbonne team had : share our passion for biology and our vision of science with high school students. We decided to create a practical class for 2nd year high school students. We based our work on the experiments Sorbonne 2017 team used for this project. Our intervention in the high school was separated in two sessions : in the first session we gave a little biology lecture and had a practical class ; in the second we analyzed the results of the experiments and presented the iGEM competition and our projects.

Two members of their team, Asmaa Foda and Saniya Kari, worked with us for the project. They were in charge of the orders necessary for the practical class (strains and material). We were in charge of the presentations slides for the two sessions (presentation of the practical course, analysis of the results, presentation of iGEM and our projects). We were glad to talk with students about biology and it was a good training for popularizing our project.

For more information about the practical class you can go to our Education & Public Engagement page.