German Meetup
As this years Marburg iGEM Team 2018 had the honor to continue the tradition of our predecessors to host the german iGEM Meetup. The meeting was established to exchange experiences earned while participating in the competition as well as getting feedback about our projects from people with a fresh perspective.
Accessible Wiki - The Collaboration
We didn’t want to stop at designing our own wiki barrier-free to make the results of the iGEM competition accessible to everyone. Because, let’s face it, there are many more amazing and interesting projects out there. This is why we decided to encourage other teams to design their wiki accessible, too. By participating in this collaboration, all parties benefit. Firstly, people with vision impairment can access the web pages easily. Secondly, the teams create a broader audience for their results. Lastly and most importantly, this collaboration is spreading awareness to the issue of an inclusive society that is long overdue.For this to happen, we put together a guide containing the basic criteria needed for an accessible website. Click here to get to our accessible wiki guide. After spreading our campaign over social media we contacted over 80 teams in personal messages. Interestingly, the majority of the other teams had never heard of accessible web design. Some did and had already implemented some criteria into their wiki.
Participating Teams:
iGEM Barcelona who designed their wiki accessible for colour-blind people.Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Chalmers Gothenburg who designed all their graphics accessible using alternative text.
Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM KCL who met some of the criteria stated in our guide.
Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Purdue who met many of the criteria found in our guide.
Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Sorbonne U Paris who met a lot of criteria stated in our guide.
Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM Westminster UK who designed their wiki partly accessible.
Click here to learn more about their project!
A very special THANK YOU goes out to the iGEM team of the Sorbonne University of Paris! After the initial contact they were highly motivated to contribute. We were thrilled to have found a team that was equally excited about this project as we were and still are. Several long and substantial mails later, both of our teams could improve our wikis. The team of Sorbonne gave us tips on how to design our wiki as responsive as possible and introduced us to e.g. tags so that your browser can recognize the language you’re writing in and by this the browser can translate it to other languages automatically. They designed their wiki barrier-free and additionally gave us very helpful tips to improve our guide to an accessible wiki. Using their tips, like e.g. adding examples, our guide is now easier to understand so that even beginner wiki managers can use our guide to design an accessible wiki.
When contacting the iGEM team of the Kings College in London, our call for an accessible iGEM competition was met with a (to us) new idea. KCL has a public campaign in which they ask to design websites accessible for people with special educational needs (sen). We were happy to participate in their campaign. It’s just as easy to design your wiki suitable for sen people as it is to design a wiki accessible for people with visual impairment!
To conclude, through this collaboration with all these amazing teams, we could improve the Human Practices part of our project by spreading awareness on the inclusion of people with disabilities into the scientific community. For the future, we hope for the iGEM community to adopt this design and by this to be a shining example for the rest of the scientific and general public. One possibility to do this could be to embrace accessible web design as a medal criterium or a requirement in general.
iGEM Duesseldorf - Postcards
iGEM Duesseldorf wanted to create a co-culture toolbox. With their project “Trinity” they want to make microbial-communities usable for diverse purposes. Since 2016, iGEM Düsseldorf is doing a postcard campaign with the purpose of educating the public about topics in synthetic biology. We were happy to join and designed a postcard which fit with our project. #vibriGAINZ. When the postcards from teams all over the world arrived we were delighted to see the work everyone put into them. Additionally, by this we got interested in all those teams and had a further look into their projectClick here to learn more about their project Trinity!
iGEM AFRL Carroll HS - Mike the Microbe
iGEM AFRL Carroll was trying to destroy biofilms using engineered E. coli. As part of their Human Practices project, they created Mike the Microbe. With this little fellow they want to connect iGEM teams from all over the world. We loved to participate and had Mike the Microbe join us in the lab for a day.Click here to learn more about their project!
iGEM IIT Madras - ChassiDex
iGEM IIT Madras is developing new tools for working with Acinetobacter baylyi. With this they want to establish this organism as a possible new chassis organism in synthetic biology. Last year’s team established a database for host organisms other than E. coli which can be used in synthetic biology. The team continues their site called ChassiDex this year as well, so we had the chance to contribute our knowledge about Vibrio natriegens. Hopefully we can help the scientific community by sharing the knowledge we gained and protocols that worked for us in the past months.
Click here to learn more about ChassiDex!
Click here to learn more about their project ADaPtat1on!
iGEM Westminster UK - Plastic Lab
iGEM Westminster wants to establish a way to degrade polystyrene (which is one of the least recycled plastics) by combining chemistry and biology. In our labs we sometimes tend to not think about the amount of waste we produce. As scientists we should try to use plastic responsibly by avoiding wastefulness, while keeping the workflow at an optimum level. We contributed to their project by filming a video showing plastic use in our labs.Click here to learn more about their project Biotroopers!
Surveys
Surveys are one of the most reliable methods to get feedback from a broad audience. So,of course, a lot of iGEM teams from all over the world are conducting them to evaluate their project. We were happy to participate to support their amazing projects!
iGEM Lund
iGEM Lund wanted to increase recombinant protein yield via co-expression of Vitreoscilla hemoglobin. They conducted a survey about workload and structures within the team. We hope we could help to improve their project.Click here to get more information about their project!
iGEM Macquarie
The iGEM Team of the Macquarie University wanted to produce Chlorophyll-Induced Vesicles in E. coli to add a new artificial cell compartment for production of substances toxic for the cell. We happily participated in their survey.Click here to get more information about their project ChiVes!
iGEM Montpellier
iGEM Montpellier wanted to develop a new non hormonal contraception method using engineered bacteria. To get an impression of people’s opinions about contraception and their project, they conducted a survey. We were happy to take part as we think that a new method of contraception which is not relying on hormones is long overdue!Click here to get more information about their project Vagineering!
iGEM Imperial College
The iGEM Team of the Imperial College in London wanted to develop of the first aerobic electrogenetic control system in E. coli. As their Human Practices project, they designed an app for team communication. We filled out a survey about common issues we face as an iGEM team to help them develop an app suited for other iGEM teams. We can’t wait to tell the next iGEM team about it!Click here to get more information about their project PixCell!
iGEM Sorbonne
iGEM Sorbonne Université wanted to produce sugar in the microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii for eco friendly sugar production compared to the production on arable land. They conducted a survey to improve their project and we were happy to take part!Click here to get more information about their project Suga[R]evolution!
InterLab Thessaloniki
WWe collaborated with this year’s Thessaloniki iGEM team by taking part in their InterLab. They are working on a synthetic biology circuit which ensures a stable protein expression. By making the gene expression independent from the potentially fluctuating copy number of plasmids, better predictions can be made about the stoichiometry when metabolic pathways are integrated into the chromosome. In this experiment we tested their four test devices.
We hope our results represent the desired outcome of the InterLab. We cultivated the cells in an incubator that was in frequent use by other team members, so the cultures weren’t shaken for multiple short intervals. If our data varies from what was expected, one explanation could be, that the Escherichia coli cells didn’t incubate correctly and therefore didn’t grow as well.
Click here to get more information about their project GALENE