| MiamiU| MiamiU
Our collaboration with the TU Dresden team started on the global iGEM Slack channel in early June.
We reached out to the TU Dresden team and set up our first virtual meeting in mid June through Zoom.
During our first meeting we began to lay the groundwork for possible areas of collaboration, however, neither team had a concrete plan and further meetings were needed to finalize the focus of our collaboration.
After a few weeks of back and forth presentations about each team's project, we decided that our main area of collaboration would be the dry lab portion, specifically, computer modeling.
Both teams projects focused on antimicrobial resistance using bacteriophages which required a heavy time investment in the wet lab.
After both teams had finished a majority of the wet lab process, ensuring our projects still had enough overlap to continue, we began work on computer modeling.
Although completing the wet lab was stressful and required changes in our project, we were glad to continue our collaboration with the TU Dresden team as antimicrobial resistance is a pertinent issue that will require international collaboration in the future to mitigate risk.
We primary assisted in lending our computing resources and power for the TU Dresden team.
Although they were experienced with AlphaFold, they had obstacles in the way of scheduling and generating their models.
We were able to solve their solution by running more models for them in less than a day.
The primary benefits we gave them were generating more models than just one (allowing for AlphaFold to create a higher confidence model) and scheduling it as soon as the sequence was given to us.
We did attempt to collaborate on comparing different modeling simulattion softwares like GROMACS versus NAMD, yet did not have enough direction from our wet lab to simualte a certain aspect of the proteins.
Overall, we lended our computing power and helped with their modeling efforts.
Meet The TU Dresden Team!
In addition to our collaboration with UT_Dresden, we also accepted an opportunity to continue our educational work through a project with Aestuarium MSP-Maastricht.
Their goal was to create an engaging resource for learning and appreciating synthetic biology and showcasing iGEM projects for 2022.
To achieve this, they chose to create a puzzle book with word searches that are themed around the projects of individual teams.
To collect material, they reached out through the global iGEM Slack channel designated for collaborations and asked interested teams to submit a 150 word project description, 10 words that described the team's project, a rationale for why each word was chosen, and a team logo.
This is where we found out about this opportunity and submitted the requested information.
After completion of the puzzle book, MSP-Maastricht emailed the final product to all contributing parties.
We were excited to be a part of their collaboration, and wish them and all other iGEM teams luck in the competition!