Every second week, we hosted inter-school meetings with representatives from the Del Norte and Westview teams (DNHS_SanDiego_CA and WVHS_SanDiego_USA, resectively), sharing ideas and providing constructive criticism on each other's projects. We decided to collaborate with one another because all of us live in San Diego and are within 20 minutes of each other, meaning that we could not only hold in-person partnership projects, but also relate better as friends.

In the beginning of the season, we mainly helped each other by discussing project ideas and iGEM's various deliverables. We talked about promo video ideas, how we would go to Paris, and how we set up our educational camp in the summer. Every time we met, we would also update each other on the progress that our lab departments were making.

During the summer and the second half of the iGEM season, we planned our ethics symposium, which happened on October 3rd. Since we all live so close to each other, we thought it would be a great opportunity to organize a meaningful, in-person event for our community. More information about our ethics symposium is detailed in the Partnership section.

On October 3rd, 2022, DNHS, WVHS, and our school held an ethics symposium at the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego. We'd been planning this event for a few months, and it had even been brought up in the 2021 iGEM season. Because we think that ethics is an integral part of synthetic biology, a symposium felt necessary, especially since those in our community may not be familiar with our projects and our ethical practices.

We invited researchers, both professional and high-school level, to speak about how they make sure their projects are ethical, whether it be in synthetic biology, the environment, or even data science. Each of our schools also gave a presentation on our iGEM projects and an overview of our Human Practices as well. We had many high-school attendees and some adult, as well as many of our iGEM team members. It was an amazing opportunity to educate our community, as well as meet WV and DN team members in-person for the first time!

Overview

Lambert was a crucial partner for the iGEM team for ideas and advice. Because they helped us out so much last year, we decided to reach out to them again for a collaboration, which turned into a partnership as the year progressed. We have had a few meetings over the course of the season, with one being to discuss our overall project and science communication, and the rest to talk about our partnership project of the season-our lab safety video.

Discussions with Lambert about their lab space and human practices were really helpful to us in shaping our project. We got the idea to reach out to schistosomiasis doctors after they mentioned that they had interviewed cardiologists, and it was also interesting to hear about how their iGEM team worked overall. We were fascinated about how much face-to-face interaction the Lambert team got on a daily basis, which encouraged us to change our iGEM team system around for next season. We're now planning weekly in-person meetings for more team bonding, as opposed to our current Discord voice calls.

Lab Safety Video

With Lambert, we were also able to produce a lab safety video to educate those interested in synthetic biology. We used equipment such as hot plates, pipettes, microscopes, and centrifuges which all require some precautions for safe use, as well as basic safety protocols like bleaching. We hope this video will be a helpful contribution for future iGEM teams who do not have lab experience yet, or even anyone interested in conducting research. *embed lab safety video*

Cooperating with Cornell, we were able to combine both of our experiences in designing and construction bioreactors to aid in this year's design and construction for both teams. Via select meetings from the drawing board to the end phase of the engineering process, we solved coding issues and construction problems together to each create improved bioreactors.