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Collaboration

Introduction​

Participating in iGEM goes way beyond just the work in the laboratory. The competition also allows young scientists and aspiring early-career researchers to connect with other like-minded people from all over Germany and even way beyond the borders of our country and continent. Throughout the year, our team attended and organized several collaboration events with other teams all across the globe. Some of the events were shaped by the now very familiar online sessions, but others were fueled by the opportunity to finally return to in-person meetings and getting to know other teams‘ members and projects personally. Our team is very grateful for all the amazing opportunities!

VAAM​

On Monday, the 21st of February, a few of our members joined the online Annual Conference of the Association for General and Applied Microbiology (VAAM e.V.). We met representatives of current and past iGEM-teams like Marburg and Bochum, who presented their work from the past years and how they contributed to scientific research or made microbiology and synthetic biology more accessible. to everyone and what experiences they gained along the way. Learning about their experiences was very insightful, especially this early in the iGEM-year!

European MeetUp​

From Friday, the 1st of July, to Sunday, the 3rd of July, Florian, Jona and Oliver of our team attended the European iGEM-MeetUp hosted by iGEM-team Hamburg. Not only did we get the chance to listen to speakers like Prof. Anthony Forster, Prof. Thomas Gorochowski, Dr. Nicolas Krink, Prof. Nico Claassens or Prof. Vitor Pinheiro, who talked about computational biology, synthetic biology and xenobiology. But we also had the chance to participate in exciting workshops on project ideation, biosafety or getting to know the great venue of the German Electron Synchroton Center (DESY). We met many other people from 15 attending iGEM-teams from all across Europe and their fascinating projects through various mini-games and two large pitching and poster sessions, where we also practiced our project and poster pitch for the first time and received lots of feedback. Last but not least, we had the opportunity to get to know the beautiful city of Hamburg with its beaches in the evenings, which complemented an amazing weekend.

JulyJam​

On Thursday, the 28th of July, and Friday, the 29th of July, our team attended the online JulyJam organized by iGEM-team Calgary. The beginnings of the meeting were filled with eight talks from representatives from different research areas and industry, who talked about iGEM, innovation and entrepreneurship in general or on specific topics like medical genetics. Afterwards, four pitching sessions, in which a total of fourteen teams from Canada, the US, Austria, Belgium, India and Thailand presented their current state of the project to a jury and to the other teams, a great opportunity for practicing pitches. The intermissions were filled with creative programs by team Calgary and lots of networking. An exciting experience overall!

JuniorJam​

Since we met many interesting and like-minded people in Hamburg earlier this year, there was no doubt we wanted to participate in Münster’s JuniorJam as well. So four of our Members found their way to Münster from 26th to 28th of August. At the Max-Planck-Institute we got the chance to present our poster once more, improved with the feedback we got from Hamburg. We got a chance to pitch our project in form of a presentation and our promotion video. Thanks to the present judges, it was a good test run for the Grand Jamboree. The jury had much detailed feedback for everything we presented, so that we will adjust our presentation style for Paris, as well as add more scientific content to our poster. They liked our storytelling and presentation in general, but criticized that it was more like a pitch and not like a scientific poster. We also received some useful tips for improving our video, which we tried to implement later as a consequence. Furthermore, we got the opportunity to attend several workshops about pitching and presenting, which also was helpful regarding the upcoming events. Connecting with many new and revisiting many known iGEM-teams made the weekend another amazing experience.

Fall Conference of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology​

From Wednesday, the 14th of September, to Friday, the 16th of September, our university, the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, hosted the annual Fall Conference of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM e.V.), the greatest German expert association for life sciences. Our team had the opportunity to organize the participation of iGEM-teams at the conference, with which we created a little iGEM-PosterHub within the large poster sessions of several hundred researchers showcasing their work. We are very glad to have welcomed representatives from the iGEM-teams Bonn-Rheinbach, Aachen and Vienna in Düsseldorf for this event, for each of which we arranged sponsored tickets with the kind help of New England Biolabs and PicoQuant. Together we had a great three days of fascinating scientific talks and breakout sessions presenting the newest research in biochemistry, molecular biology, biophysics and synthetic biology from institutions all across Europe. The rising applications of computational biology and models as well as the research area of nanoparticles and intelligent materials were evident, and the idea of bottom-up biology to create functional cells from scratch excited us a lot. The opportunity to connect with young and experienced scientists from all these different research areas and to receive feedback on our projects and posters made the event a great success for all participants!

Future of space exploration with iGEM 2022 projects poster​

In September, iGEM-Team Estonia_TUIT invited us to participate in their digital poster presenting iGEM-projects related to space exploration. We were very happy to submit our project and logo planet for the poster and to get to know other teams with projects related to this exciting topic. Let’s use synthetic biology to push the borders of our knowledge!

Postcard Project​

In 2022, our team continued its nowadays popular tradition of our yearly postcard project and again asked iGEM-teams from all over the world to sign-up and participate by creating their very own postcard design and sending their card with a short project description to us for distribution among other participants. A total of 12 teams signed up for our project and as of the making of our Wiki, we are currently receiving the postcards and preparing the distribution back to the teams. Stay on the lookout for your postcard delivery and do not miss our Postcard Project in 2023!