On this page of the website we will give a description of the different interactions and collaborations that we had with other iGEM teams. We gave a lot of attention to joining as many events created by the other teams as well as learning about their projects. It was a wonderful experience to learn how different teams tackled different problems and how each team came up with original events. See more on how the contributions turned out on their respective pages by clicking the titles. Our work with iGEM Bath was so extensive that we put it on a separate page: read about it on our partnership page!

iGEM Maastricht caught our eye straight away because of the resemblance between our projects. After a call in which they gave more details about their exciting project, we decided that it would be fun to work together. Both iGEM Maastricht and our team made similar surveys that were diffused separately, with the intend to reach different people within both of our environments. We then compared results and conclusions found from both surveys regarding the look on synthetic biology by the broader public. It was great to see how their surveys reflected our found results and gave us more confidence in presenting them.

Since we can always learn from others and our projects fit in the same field, we decided to help each other by proofreading each other’s websites and giving feedback about it.

Because we had been working with Bath already, after getting an explanation of the wonderful projects of Maastricht, we saw the opportunity to all work together. For this we came up with a group proposed implementation by putting our separate proposed implementations together in series. This results in water purification at different levels and could be very useful for future uses and reduce energy costs compared to running all of the plants separately. In both Bath’s and our projects there are stepts built in to obtain valuable, complementary resources for farmlands aka. calcium carbonate and phosphates. This means our shared plant could easily be coupled to a large farm!

Also in collaboration with Maastricht, we launched a survey on the organization as iGEM as whole. This worked to let teams critically reflect on their opinions on the competition and allowed everyone to give suggestions on how to better it, in this way we wanted to contribute to bettering iGEM together!

Our team took part in an event/fundraiser from KULeuven and Stop Darmkanker. We prepared an easy explanation of iGEM for the broad public and compiled some controversial statements about GMO’s to get a better insight in the views on it from people not involved in the biotechnological field.

We also took this opportunity to get to know the KULeuven iGEM team better and to talk about their experiences with iGEM so far. Their respective members involved with modeling even gave some feedback on our model and gave us confirmation that it was understandable for people from other teams.  

Apart from these collaborations we also joined in on as many events as possible from other teams. As such, we followed an exciting workshop from iGEM TUDelft where we learned more about entrepreneurship in the synthetic biology field and we joined an online seminar about research integrity organized by iGEM Freiburg. A quiz was organized by iGEM Cambridge , where a lot of us got to meet and got to get involved in a little friendly competition. We took part in a project of UCPH iGEM NETLANTIS for their promotion video and we made up a character for the iGEM map project of iGEM NTHU. Lastly, we contributed a word search to the puzzle book created by Igem Maastricht with words centered around our Igem project.