European Meetup

Many of our collaborations, partnerships, and general communication with other iGEM teams stemmed from the European Meetup in Hamburg. This two day conference featured guest speakers including Prof. Dr. Anthony Forster of Uppsala Universitet and Dr. Thomas Gorochowski of the University of Bristol, many fun activities where we got to know the members of other iGEM Teams, and a poster session where we could learn about other Teams projects. We had many meaningful interactions with representatives of the German Association for Synthetic Biology (GASB) as well. The interactions we had with iGEM Teams such as Freiburg, TUDelft, Munich and Münster helped shape the way we presented our project, and overall we learned a lot about the iGEM experience.

Meetings with Team Freiburg

Meetings with Team Freiburg continued after the European meetup, where every few weeks we would schedule a zoom call to discuss the project, lab work and how to approach iGEM in general. What was particularly useful was explaining how all the different facets of our project link together towards one common goal and assisted us in clearly defining PETALUTION.

Partnership with Team Munich

The European Meetup also led to a fruitful bioinformatic partnership with Team Munich. In short, we designed a bioinformatic pipeline for the automated docking and mutation of transcriptional repressors, created a tutorial for future iGEM teams on how to perform docking simulations, and gave each other feedback on wikis. Detailed information on this partnership is available on the partnership page.

Discussion sessions with Goethe Frankfurt

We also had multiple discussion sessions with the Goethe Frankfurt iGEM Team, as they are also dealing with heavy metal biosensing and metallothioneins. The key difference between our projects is that theirs is entirely cell-based, whereas ours is entirely cell free. Nonetheless we were able to have great discussions on optimal metallothionein expression in vivo. They helped us optimize bacterial growth conditions for metallothionein expression, and we showed them references on how SUMO can be used to prevent metallothionein degradation. We also discussed safety considerations when it came to using Cadmium, and shared research on the different species of metallothioneins.

UK Meetup

In September, we attended the 2022 UK iGEM Meetup organised by Team Imperial College London. On the first day of the event, we listened to the speeches led by professors and researchers from Imperial College London, King's College London, and University of Cambridge. The speeches covered areas ranging from leading synthetic biology applications of artificial cells and chemical synthesizers to bio-automation and gene networks, and they were very enlightening and beneficial. The mock-presentation on the second day of the event also gave us an insight into what problems other iGEMers are working on and how to think about synthetic biology in real-world applications. Also, the comments given by judges and researchers were thoughtful and constructive.