We reached out to various iGEM teams around the world with the invitation to join us for a virtual conference where we all exchange ideas and gain feedback to better our respective projects as well as our human practices.
A proposal was sent to all the various teams we had interacted with throughout our project
The conference began with 15 minutes of opening remarks, and introductions of all the various team members. After that, each team was given 5 minutes to present the main aspects of their project.This was done by sharing a powerpoint presentation that each team was asked to prepare prior to the conference. The screen-sharing feature was used to share the presentation with the conference participants. Each presentation was followed by 10 minutes of questions, feedback and advice from other teams to the presenting team.
Six teams, including our team ended up participating in the conference on September 15th, which took place over a google hangouts call for approximately 2 hours. The main challenge we encountered when planning and organizing the event, was arranging a time that was reasonable for all the teams participating taken into account the time difference especially as we were joined with teams from Turkey, Australia, China and India.
The points that the teams have discussed including but are not limited to the following:
1) Tell us more about your project and why you chose the idea. Are you participating in any special track?
2) What kind of experiments will you be doing?
3) What are some challenges that you are currently facing or you anticipate to face?
4) How will you incorporate integrated human practices into your project? Are you looking for contacts with experts in the field?
If your institution has participated in iGEM before, what are some winning project tips that you can give to the other teams?
Great appreciation to Team HKUST from Hong Kong, REC Chennai, VIT Vellore from India, Saint Joseph Istanbul from Turkey, iGEM Macquarie from Australia for the fruitful conversation. We look forward to meeting you in person in Boston!
We have initiated a collaboration request to ALL iGEM teams. We invite them to join us in showcasing the wonderment of iGEM and synthetic biology by creating a science sketch of their team’s project or any major techniques/principles that their project is using.
Through the series of 1-3-minute sketches, we hope to promote public awareness of the iGEM competition as well as to show how synthetic biology can be utilized to solve problems facing mankind in an innovative manner!
The aim of the science sketches is to make a collaborative educational playlist with videos from teams all over the world, about their projects and/or the scientific principle behind their project. This playlist will be made public, so that any iGEM team can use it in their outreach activities, thus enabling all teams to spread the knowledge of synthetic biology to their communities.
We have also created a detailed description of how to make a science sketch to help other teams in creating their science sketches.
IGEM:
RPA:
LAMP:
Several iGEM teams have participated in our science sketch collaboration, including Team REC Chennai, Team ICT-Mumbai from India, Team CPU from China, and Team Uppsala from Sweden.
REC Chennai:
CPU China:
Uppsala:
Tec-Chihuahua:
ICT-Mumbai:
We collaborated with iGEM Team Linkoping Sweden in their Dear Diary initiative. We recorded interesting and fun things happened inside and outside the lab. We then sent it to Team Linkoping Sweden, who collected the diaries from each team and compiled them into a book/document. Through this initiative, we were able to showcase our excitement and interesting work for iGEM with the wider public.
We collaborated with iGEM Team IlT-Madras in their Language Project Initiative, aiding them in creating several synthetic biology educational videos in various languages. We received the English script of the video from IlT-Madras, translated in into different languages, as well as recording the audio of the script. Due to the diversity of our team, we were able to help them with 6 different language versions of the videos, namely, “Introduction to Synthetic Biology” in Mandarin, Bosnian, Korean, and “DNA and RNA” in Arabic.
Mandarin: Introduction to Synthetic Biology
Bosnian: Introduction to Synthetic Biology
Korean: Introduction to Synthetic Biology
Arabic: RNA and DNA
We held a Wiki Workshop for our iGEM team that covers the basics of web development from HTML and CSS to Javascript. We also covered the basics of a good design, a good website, and a good visual identity. In addition to that, we went over the iGEM Wiki rules and resources.
All of our iGEM team were in attendance of this workshops in addition to a few members from iGEM VIT both over skype and in real life.
Here are the contents of the workshop, that we want to make available to all iGEM teams in the future to make use of when creating their Wiki’s:
