Team:UCSC/Collaborations

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Collaborations

The Importance of Collaboration

The iGEM Competition stresses the importance of collaborations between scientists and encourages teams to significantly collaborate with one or more iGEM teams. Collaboration is an important component of scientific research in general, as it teaches will-be scientists to exchange ideas and assist others in their innovations. Our team has collaborated with several iGEM teams as well as a team of undergraduate researchers outside of the iGEM Competition.

University of Minnesota (UM) iGEM Team

Our collaboration with the University of Minnesota (UM) iGEM team began when four UCSC team members Skyped with two members of the UM team. During the meeting, we exchanged information about our projects and our progress on them, and we noticed that the human practices portion of UM’s project was lacking; with our strong background in outreach and human practices, we helped UM develop their human practices. Four of our iGEM team members met the UM team at their lab in Minnesota. When talking with them, we realized that their project had much more potential value than they were aiming for; we advised their team to reach out to areas affected by their project target (mercury ion pollution), and to speak with environmental regulatory groups in Minnesota to gain insight about potential users. We also suggested they start a crowdfunding campaign so their entire team can attend the Jamboree in Boston, since they had not even considered that to be an option. We plan to follow up with UM to discuss the expansion of their human practices.