Collaboration
The competition iGEM permits to meet many teams from all over the world. It is not only a scientific competition but also a human competition thanks to all the collaborations and meetings. Our team collaborated with diverse teams by first participating in different meet-ups.
Meet Up France - iGEM Toulouse
iGEM Toulouse organized a mini Jamboree for all the french iGEM teams which took place at the INSA Toulouse school from the 7th of July to the 9th of July. During this meet-up, we had the opportunity to practice for the Giant Jamboree. We first did a poster session to pitch our project and then, a presentation in front of professionals and the other iGEM teams. We got many questions about our project that made us think on what steps we needed to do to obtain our proof of concept, as well as how to improve our project altogether, notably on how to model our system, how to organize our microbial fuel cell with two bacterial strains and on the future prospects of StarchLight. During this mini Jamboree, the jury gave out a few prizes, and we won the prize for the “best pitch” during the poster session, which gave us confidence about the success of our project. This meet-up gave us the opportunity to exchange with the other iGEM french teams about the competition and our projects, and to give each other advice for our projects.
Figure 1: Pictures of our team during the French meet-up organized by the iGEM Toulouse team
SU Jambodeling 2022 - iGEM Sorbonne
The iGEM Sorbonne team organized a Parisian meet up to work on the modeling of our projects on the 24th and 25th of September as they have several members specialized in it. During the meet-up, the different teams shared their progress towards modeling their respective biological systems. We discussed ways each model could be improved as well as general knowledge on systems modeling. A coding session was organized after which we discussed our achievements and the issues we faced.
Figure 2: Picture of the different teams present at the SU Jambodeling
World Environment Day - iGEM Vilnius
We did a challenge launched by the iGEM Vilnius team that aims to take a picture near a source of water in our local area for the International Environment Day. We decided to go to a park near our school where there is a water point and to do the iGEM letters.
Figure 3: Our picture for the International Environment Day organized by iGEM Vilnius team
World Lymphoma Awareness Day - iGEM UB
The iGEM UB team proposed us to participate in a collaboration for the World Lymphoma Awareness Day by presenting a type of lymphoma. They asked us to present the Mixed-cellularity Hodgkin lymphoma. It was interesting to learn more about lymphoma and to help them to raise awareness around this type of disease.
Figure 4: The sum-up of the Mixed-cellularity Hodkin lymphoma done by our team on the instagram post of the iGEM UB team
Podcast collaboration - iGEM KU Leuven
Our team agreed to do the podcast collaboration organized by the iGEM KU Leuven team about a scientist that had overcome difficulties. Our team leader decided to do this about Harris H.Wang, a biophysicist. In 2009, he created the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) which is capable of creating new organisms in a faster and cheaper way. It is a technique that is fully automated that allows industrialists and researchers to improve specific capacities of wild-type bacteria so they can drive the evolution and get these bacteria capacities they want. This collaboration was a great idea to show people that everything does not go as planned in science.
Figure 5: Our podcast done by our team leader, Alexandre, on Harris H. Wang
iGEM map - iGEM NTHU
We participated in the iGEM map done by the iGEM NTHU team where our mascot is represented with a short description of our project. (https://2022.igem.wiki/nthu-taiwan/collaborations). This collaboration lets us discover the project of each team easily by showing a short abstract when clicking on each mascot, as well as giving the links to their social media. This is the link of the video presented all the teams that participated in: https://video.igem.org/w/dzZFHGQfSVD3GgzXyUQQYC.
Figure 6: Map done by the iGEM NTHU team
Figure 7: NTHU_Taiwan: iGEM MAP (2022) [English]
Figure 8: Logo of iGEM UNSW team
Article on a synthetic biology project - iGEM UNSW
The iGEM UNSW team asked us to write an article on synthetic biology as a project collaboration. Our team leader wrote an article on a new way to produce alcane tanks to synthetic biology. He wrote it both in French and English.
Science Fair at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie - Parisians iGEM teams
The “Cité des sciences et de l’industrie” is a popular scientific museum located in Paris that has been extensively putting efforts in popularizing science to a public of non-scientific, especially children. Their thematics are often broached with workshops in order to better assimilate the knowledge around the subject and raise awareness about specific topics, such as ecology. For this purpose, we participated in the 2022 edition of “Science Fair” in collaboration with other Parisian teams. Together, we organized an iGEM room where we created a few activities around our themes. The goal of this project was to get broader audiences interested in synthetic biology, explain how it works and how it could change aspects of our lives. Moreover, we wanted to show that science, especially biology, is accessible to all and goes beyond lessons we learn in school, and that it is fun when you want it to be.
Then, we carried experiments linked to science as micropipettes to show how it works by using dyes. The audience at this stand was children.
Figure 9: Picture of members of our team at the micropipette stand at the Science Fair
Next, we had access to a laboratory, we did a DNA extraction with onions by using salt, dishwashing liquid and ethanol, and observations at a microscope of onion cells, algae cells of the iGEM Sorbonne and Streptomyces of the iGEM GO Paris-Saclay. The audience was an older audience.
Figure 10: Picture of the different Parisian teams in the laboratory at the Science Fair
During this Science, we succeed in organizing this event with all the other Parisian teams by doing several meetings to know what activities we will do.
Figure 11: Picture in front of the “Cité des sciences et de l’industrie” with iGEM Sorbonne and iGEM GO Paris-Saclay teams
Figure 12: Logo of the iGEM TU Delft team
Translation - iGEM TU Delft
Our team provided our help to the iGEM TU Delft team by translating their surveys on the creation of a biosensor for the so-called "rape drug", aka GHB. We translated in French two surveys, one intended for nightclub managers to see how they could implement their device, and the other for regular people who go out to nightclubs and bars. Moreover, we spread the survey destined to people on our Instagram account in order to give them data from France.