| Bio-Brussels - iGEM 2022

Partnership: UniofBath and Bio-Brussels

We have been in touch with UniofBath during a large part of this journey. Our first meeting was in July where we explained our projects and where we brainstormed on how we, as first-time iGEM teams, could work together. We soon came up with the idea of a manual for future first-time teams with tips and attention points that we learned during our journey. At the beginning we believed that that was all we were going to do, but we continued having meetings and keeping each other up to date about our advances in the lab and by hearing about each other’s progress we became hungry for more.

Of course, we still decided to make a manual for future iGEM teams. This turned out to be great because both teams had very different experiences and, maybe even more importantly, struggles. Even though this manual is written for first time iGEM teams, we believe that this manual could be useful for every team, because we can all learn from each other. Please check out our manual in the CONTRIBUTION page.

But like we said, we didn’t stop there…

Because UniofBath was also working on water, they also took part in the collaboration with the iGEM team from Maastricht University to make a triple proposed implementation capable of removing calcium, salt and, because of Bath, also phosphate from our water! That way we can combine water purification with fertilization. You can also check out this amazing water purification installation on our COLLABORATION page.

To learn even more from each other, we also decided to test and exchange some feedback on each other’s models. It was great to receive some perspective from the Bath modelling team, since they have stronger expertise in programming so it certainly made our code more efficient, understandable and concise. It was also great to help them out with providing some biological insights into their models (like offering estimates for certain constants).

UniofBath also made a very informative leaflet to spread the word about how extremely cool synthetic biology is. They made it in two languages: English and Portuguese and spread it out over the UK and Brasil. As BioBrussels we also thought we could help by translating the leaflet to Dutch and French as well as spreading the leaflet through Brussels!

Leaflet English Dutch French

We also read each other websites and gave each other feedback. UniofBath also introduced us to "Phoenix project" which helped us so much when writing and designing everything on our website.

In conclusion we could say that we have had a pretty good run together and even though it may not sound like much, just talking to each other and exchanging information about the competition was of such crucial importance to our project. This especially because we were both first time iGEM teams without a great manual to help us out 😀. We couldn’t have completed our project without the support from their team and are forever grateful to have had their imput every step of the way and are looking forward to see eachother for the first time in Paris!