Collaboration

Collaboration with Team Aboa from Turku, Finland

We spent a day visiting Turku, where the Aboa team organised several activities for us including presentations of our projects, troubleshooting brainstorming sessions, and discussions about our experiences and what can be improved for each of our projects going forward. We had the chance to see their labspace, too.

With Turku, we have planned our collaboration around educational outreach and science communication, given that we are the only two teams from Finland and wanted to join forces on spreading knowledge about synthetic biology locally. To this end, we have collaborated in three key ways:

• Joint childrens' science workshop at “Heureka Science Museum”, Vantaa, Finland, on 10th September. Heureka is a Finnish Science Centre that introduces the public to science and technology in an engaging, interactive way through exhibitions, films, educational programmes and other workshop-style events. Heureka's operations are subsidised by the Ministry of Education and Culture and the City of Vantaa. On this day, our worked together to lead two interactive workshops for children: one around testing the pH of various foods, and the other around making a centrifuge.
• Joint presentation of synthetic biology principles at “The Science Basement” on 24th September, as well as presentations here of our own projects as applications to therapeutics and agricultural uses respectively. The Science Basement is a Finnish forum for early career scientists to pitch, discuss, and receive feedback on their ideas from fellow scientists, often in the form of a live presentation or podcast. Our joint presentation was followed by a Q&A session in which we explained our results in more detail

Collaborations across Europe

Patras, Greece

We provided the Finnish translation for Patras' children's comic, 'Synthetic Biology's Mischief'.

Latvia

At the end of June, we had a fruitful discussion with the first-ever Latvia team about the challenges and successes of setting up a brand new iGEM team, where we advised them about funding sources especially as well as sharing ideas on effective team organisation.

Given that we are both located in the Baltic region, we ideated together about organising a Baltic Jamboree/meet-up. Unfortunately, we were not able to attend the meet-up in the end due to scheduling constraints, but it went ahead at the end of August in Vilnius, Lithuania. We are happy to have participated in general the extension of Baltic-wide iGEM contact and, hopefully, the expansion of student-led synthetic biology in the region.

Leiden, Netherlands

At the JuniorJam meet-up in Münster, Germany, between 26-28 August, the Leiden team approached us to collaborate on correlating team structure and support levels to the eventual success of an iGEM project. We answered survey questions about how our team is organised among members (e.g. sub-group division and leadership), the frequency and content of our meetings, what kind of help we have been offered by our home university PIs, what kind of financial support we have access to, and more.

Aachen, Germany

We participated in a fun collaboration with the Aachen team from Germany, where we received a microbe plushie toy that has been travelling around Europe. We will be posted picture of it with an informational text about synthetic biology on Instagram before sending it forward to Gothenburg, Sweden.

Copenhagen, Denmark

The UCPH team from Copenhagen asked us to participate in their promo video. We sent them a short video clip of our team member in front of the sea saying a word we associate with it. Our word was “vapaus” which is Finnish for “freedom”.

Lund, Sweden

In September, we contributed to the Lund team's SynBio Dictionary. The dictionary aims to define basic biological concepts related to genetic engineering as well as containing a synthetic biology-specific vocabulary section, and finally a section for teams to briefly promote their own project. The project is geared towards people who are not formally educated in biology, and will be both printed on paper and available as a digital repository.
Alongside our brief project description, we contributed the following definitions:

DARPin (Designed Ankyrin Repeat Proteins): are synthetically produced proteins mimicking antibodies. They are derived from natural ankyrin repeat proteins and flanked by an N-cap and a C-cap, between which are typically 1-5 repeats of the same 33 amino acids (Seeger et al., 2013; Binz et al., 2003).

Biofilms: are a structural community of bacteria and microorganism adhering to a solid surface that are usually encased in a polysaccharide matrix, i.e. sugar matrix (Høiby et al., 2010).

Ribosome Display: a methodology for in vitro affinity selection of proteins. This helps to identify the binding protein partners with the highest affinity (Zahnd, Amstutz and Plückthun, 2007)

Chronic wound: a wound that does not heal. A wound that does not heal for three months is considered chronic (Nunan et al., 2014).

Quorum sensing: bacterial density measurement via a regulatory system monitoring population size and gene expression (Rutherford and Bassler, 2015).