The NYU Abu Dhabi iGEM team strongly believes that collaborations are an important aspect of the competition. Having the opportunity to connect and work with teams from different parts of the world is unique, to say the least, and our team feels that we have learned a lot in exchanging informations with other teams. We are especially excited about this year's collaborations as we worked together with other teams on creative projects, on top of the collaborations on the technical and lab aspects.
After submitting our collaboration request to the iGEM HQ in June the Linköping University (LiU) iGEM team reached out to us in July via email. Shortly after this initial contact we coordinated our first virtual meeting between our teams on July 13th. Three of our team members met with the LiU iGEM team. In this meeting each team gave an overview of their projects and we discussed potential points of collaboration, such as exchange of knowledge, trading samples, and authorship of a book on aptamers. We stayed in communication via email following this meeting and gained insight into each other’s processes and this helped guide us in the planning of our experiments. One important thing that came out of this was the exchanging of information; namely, LiU provided us with a protocol for the synthesis of the peptide Tau and in return, we provided them with the steps for functionalization of a chip. Additionally, we helped in the authorship of the book on the fundamentals of aptamers. For this book we wrote the first chapter giving the reader an overview of aptamers while discussing the history of their use and involvement in current research. We decided to meet again on October 9 to discuss our progress, and we provided the LiU iGEM team with a revised protocol for the one they gave us prior.
Later in our project the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) iGEM team reached out to us because of our mutual regional location. They were interested in organizing a Middle East iGEM virtual meet-up and we arranged an initial introduction meeting with them. Four of our team members virtually met with two members of the Technion iGEM team on September 15th. Each team talked about their project and other iGEM related things. We learned in this meeting that the other Middle East teams were unresponsive to the Technion team’s outreach so the Middle East meet-up was no longer going to happen. However they told us about their iGEM podcast series, which we were interested in being guests on. Additionally, they did invite us to join the virtual mock jamboree they were organizing for teams to practice presenting their projects. We followed up with the Technion team the following week to coordinate the podcast and had our two co-heads of lab speak on the podcast as guests. We also declared our team’s participation in the virtual mock jamboree, which will be happening the week before the Grand Jamboree in Paris. We also agreed to share the Aptamers book with them once it was finalized.
Aptamer Book Teams:
Mock Jamboree Teams:
One of the interesting collaboration projects we had was with iGEM Middle East and Africa. iGEM Africa is a team of iGEM ambassadors who are interested in developing an iGEM League Competition for university students in the Middle East and Africa. The mission of this league competition is to empower local people to solve local problems using synthetic biology approaches. They contacted us in order to have an interview with us and learn more about our experience in the iGEM competition, the challenges we faced, as well as our unique perspective on using biology as a technology to solve local problems in the United Arab Emirates. During the competition we discussed several ideas including creating competition between countries within the African continent to make it easier for local students to compete. This point led to crucial ideas of developing iGEM Africa teams to work on more relevant topics to their location and need as well to involve local community and investors. We were happy to invite the team to join us during our events during which we promoted synthetic biology and our iGEM team.
For our second meeting, we discussed connecting iGEM Africa team with other universities in UAE as well as bio companies to be their potential partners, investors, etc. Lastly, our team wanted to help them understand the importance of the distribution kits iGEM provided that they were particularly interested in. Regarding this, we provided them with the following information: "IGEM distribution kits are a great tool used for training students in the fundamental techniques of molecular biology. The utilization of the 3A assembly is a great tool to teach bacterial transformation along with restriction enzyme digest and ligations. With the numerous amounts of parts available, our iGEM team can have limitless possibilities of potential projects to enhance the field of synthetic biology."
Lastly, iGEM Africa shared this survey with our team to fill individually in order to share and improve our experience as iGEM students.