When trying to figure out what on earth we could do for our contributions we asked ourselves the questions “What makes us as a team unique?”, sure; we’re making a super cool new synthetic biology application, but so are all of the other iGEM teams. What perspectives do we have to offer that can really help future teams that they might not get from different teams? And three things really came to mind.

We’re a first time iGEM team; that means we had to do the nitty gritty stuff of setting up sponsorship contracts, getting agreements from our universities, finding a name and all that stuff that other iGEM teams can use from teams that came before them. We wanted to help guide future first time iGEM teams through that experience and hopefully offer some tips on making the whole process of starting an iGEM team a little easier for them. That’s why we partnered up with UniofBath to write a manual through the iGEM cycle, complete with tips from each of our team members responsible for those parts and helpful insights we obtained from other iGEM teams. It was a super fun collaboration but we also hope it could form a really helpful one!

& learn more about how our collaboration evolved on our partnership page.

We’re doing a lot of standard lab work, but also work on water softening for example which is something we had trouble finding good information on and the right expertise in because it was so far from what we usually do, also we couldn’t find a lot of information on how the previous iGEM teams who have worked on hard water handled for example: making hard water. That’s why we figured it might be helpful if we digitalized our lab book for future teams who want to do similar work to what we’re doing, that way they can learn from our mistakes!

Together with iGEM Maastricht we launched a survey into teams their opinions on the iGEM competition and gave them a space to offer feedback on how the competition could be bettered. We’ve bundled the feedback here for everyone, that way we can strive together towards a better competition! This word cloud shows everyone’s favorite parts of the competition, to read more in depth about the feedback we received you can read our survey results below it.

We’re working with a completely new part, which is why we published our part and documented how to work with it. Find out more about ENA and how to use it int he parts registry through this link.