Our team held discussions with the iGEMs teams at Cornell, Yale, and Johns Hopkins to gain new perspectives and extend the reach of our project. Through these meetings, we were able to highlight our wet lab and outreach efforts, pitch ideas for collaboration, and exchange feedback on our projects. Additionally, from our meeting with the Cornell iGEM team, we gained insightful suggestions surrounding the use of bacteriophages for our project since their current project is dealing with a bacteriotherapy system to eliminate cancerous cells. Ultimately, from these meetings, we had meaningful exchanges with the teams we looked upon that allowed us to optimize our project.

Yale

Our team met with the iGEM team at Yale to extend the reach of our project and gain feedback on aspects of our project. We held a virtual meeting with their team and discussed ideas for a collaborative science art website that includes asking professors and other health professionals from both McMaster and Yale to submit their artwork. The artwork included paintings, poetry, music, graphics and even photography. We created this website to allow professionals to have an outlet for their creative projects and in doing so we hope to inspire aspiring health professionals and science students to showcase their creative side.

Johns Hopkins

Our team met with the iGEM team at Johns Hopkins to broaden the scope of our research and get input on many areas of our project. We held virtual meetings with their team and discussed concepts for a website that would bring together science and art, specifically artwork submitted by healthcare professionals from both Johns Hopkins and McMaster. By providing professionals with a platform for their creative endeavors, we seek to encourage aspiring health professionals and science students to express their creative side.

Cornell

Our team met with the iGEM team at Cornell to gain feedback on our project. Since they are currently working with bacteriophages, we used their experiences with phages to improve the phage therapy aspect of our project. We also designed a collection of various iGEM team’s favorite bacterium/model as part of our collaborative project with Cornell’s iGEM team.

We collaborated with Cornell’s iGEM team on making a collection of various iGEM teams’ favorite bacterium/model. Our favorite model is adherent-invasive E. coli, which we investigated for our project last year on IBD. We discussed potentials and goals for this project in our virtual meeting and we are excited to have helped Cornell iGEM in bringing this project to life.

Song

We created a mashup song to teach our audience about synthetic biology, so that they can better understand our project. We aim to make synthetic biology, which can seem like an intimidating and abstract concept to the general audience, into an interactive experience through song lyrics and an animated lyric video. We mixed together four popular songs: Style, Call Me By Your Name, Levitating, and Misery. The listener can enjoy familiar melodies, while the change in song keeps them engaged throughout. The lyrics include everything from the discovery of synthetic biology to techniques such as gene editing. Combined with visual elements from the lyric video, the listener can gain a general idea of what synthetic biology entails.

On this project, we collaborated with two other iGEM teams: iGEM Warwick and iGEM Concordia, and included their voices in our song. We enjoyed sharing our talents and our passion for synthetic biology with each other. This project was a great chance for us to be inclusive of iGEM teams from around the world while educating our audience about synthetic biology.