Collaborations
Baltic Jamboree 2022
We participated in the first ever Baltic Jamboree at Vilnius, Lithuania, where we met with the Vilnius-Lithuania and Estonia_TUIT teams. As we are the first ever team from Latvia, finally a Baltic Jamboree which includes teams from the three Baltic states could take place. During the three days in Vilnius, we explored how the Vilnius-Lithuania and Estonia_TUIT teams conduct their iGEM projects, discussed our problems within brainstorming sessions and got to hear the origin stories of iGEM in Lithuania. We are very grateful to experience such a warm welcome from our neighboring iGEM teams.
During the summer, we collaborated with the Technion-Israel iGEM team, who are working on their Angel Roots project. Because our projects are similar, in that we are trying to produce a plant secondary metabolite in a microorganism, we found discussions of our projects very helpful. We discussed the ideas, pathways and modelling within our projects. We also participated in their Angel Roots podcast, where we discussed our RhodoCrocin project and also the struggles of starting an iGEM team from scratch. The link to the podcast.
The Technion-Israel team also suggested a novel way to quantify crocin - through the use of the Hippo pathway. We have sent a sample of our crocin standard to the Technion team in hopes that they will find a new way to quanitify crocin!
Throughout our work this summer we formed a partnership with the Uppsala iGEM team which was working on their PETerminator. As our RhodoCrocin project was inspired by the Uppsala 2017 teams’ project, our collaboration started with discussions about their previous project. However, it later evolved to a general information exchange where the Uppsala team helped us a lot with the problems we were experiencing in the lab. The goal of our partnership was to facilitate information exchange between projects that could move lab and subgroup work forward. We shared protocols and tips for lab and subgroup work over four meetings throughout the summer. The Uppsala team provided critical information for PCR primer optimization, which helped us create the transcriptional units we were looking for.
Eastern European meetup
We participated in an Eastern European meetup organised by the ELTE iGEM team. Hungary, just like Latvia, is participating in iGEM for the first time and it was useful for our teams to chat and share our iGEM experience with each other. Similarly, we gained a lot by listening to the presentations of ELTE and Estonia_TUIT as well as by introducing our work to them by the standards of Grand Jamboree.
