Partnership
Introduction
During the common course of the teams in the competition, our team developed a Partnership with two other iGEM teams creating a three way partnership, mutually contributing at different levels, such as Dry lab, Human Practices and Social Media. More specifically, we formed a three-way Partnership with the teams iGEM Aboa, from Finland and iGEM TecCEM from Mexico, since we realized that our projects share the same goals regarding the improvement and contribution to the agricultural sector through Synthetic Biology.
iGEM Aboa
Team ABOA from Finland consists of 14 students from the University of Turku. They are creating a detection system for plant pathogens to improve food scarcity and provide an easy-to-use test for agriculture.
iGEM TecCEM
Team TecCEM from Mexico consists of 34 students from the University of Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. Their project this year is mainly focused on catching and degrading Endocrine Disruptors on residual water used in agriculture by the help of the immobilized laccase enzyme on a filter. We are also working on a biosensor that can quantify the amount of Endocrine Disruptors on the water.
Meetings
For many months, there had been regular meetings between the Teams to discuss our projects and their progress, exchanging ideas and finding common grounds in communicating and combining our projects as well as helping each other to achieve the best possible outcome.
Farmer's Handbook of Synthetic Biology
The Handbook was an initiative from the three teams with the aim of providing to the farmers a guideline regarding the introduction of Synthetic Biology concept and its applications in the field of Agriculture. Since our countries (Finland, Mexico and Greece) are characterized by important occupation of agriculture, a sector that is dealing with different issues, we decided to present how our teams aspire to solve those problems through Synthetic Biology. The goal of the Handbook is for every farmer to have a simplified and useful guide about Synthetic Biology in agricultural practices, therefore we created a Synthetic Biology Glossary attached to it.
To create a useful educational tool for farmers, we included information on plant diseases and their impact on agriculture globally and introduced a few plant diseases and pathogens around the world. There was important information about the literature of pathogens (i.e plant viruses, fungi and bacteria), the symptoms they cause in the plant as well as images about the pathogenic phenotype of the affected plants.
Since our projects promote bio-sustainability, we devoted a significant section of the Handbook to sustainable agricultural practices. We introduced the concept of sustainability and how it can be promoted through the reduction of the burden of the soil with pesticides and fertilizers, by proposing alternative and more ecological sources for soil enrichment and crop protection. We hope through this Handbook to provide useful material and encourage farmers to adopt agricultural practices that are more respectful towards biodiversity and the consumers.
This Handbook was written in English and was translated by our Team in Greek, and was evaluated by farmers and agronomists during our Integrated Human Practices process. It helped us find critical bibliographic data that helped all three projects in understanding more about the pathogens, promoting sustainability, as well as collaborating in creating an educational tool for the final users of our projects, get more close to them and understand better the impact we can make through our work.
The English version of the Handbook:
The Greek version can be found here!
Dry Lab Collaboration
Our team provided team Aboa with important information regarding plant viruses that are detected in Greece, and more specifically Tobacco mosaic virus and Potato Virus Y. This information was provided for the enrichment of the team's toehold switch library, in order to conduct nucleotide similarity search and detect other viruses or pathogens that have the same conserved areas. This enriched the research of team Aboa in plant viruses.
iGEM Aboa helped the project PAGGAIA, by providing us with conserved regions of a few viruses that can be used in their soil analysis. We received conserved sequences of tomato brown rugose virus, cucumber green mottle virus, wheat dwarf virus, tomato chlorosis virus and potato virus Y. Through these conserved sequences of the plant pathogens team Aboa contributed to our project by improving soil analysis and expanding the spectrum of the data regarding the pathogens in the soil.
iGEM TecCEM helped project PAGGAIA through providing important information about irrigation water and their findings, which were useful regarding the better understanding of the relationship between irrigation and soil microbiome. This was very useful information for our project and definitely expanded the knowledge regarding the relationship between the soil and the water table, and how it affects the crop.
Our Team provided valuable information about laccase enzymes that were used by team TecCEM in order to expand their research. This information helped them to decide correctly on the type of enzyme they used, making an equally useful impact on the course of their project with the additional data.
Integrated Human Practices on SDGs
We organized an online meeting with SDGs experts Karla Nayeli Munoz Rubio and Ana Gabriela Gonzalez Castillo, SDGs experts and activists. The main goal of the meeting was for all three teams to discuss with these experts about SDGs and the concept of sustainability, to better understand their importance. After the project presentations, there was a round table discussion around the goals of its project and the possible impact on the users of the final products.
The experts identified the main SDGs that each project can target and helped us understand how they could promote sustainability. There were suggestions on how to classify our SDGs to primary and secondary, according to the impact they could make to society and the environment. This constructive feedback was a helpful guide for our team to better perceive the impact and dimension of our project and organize the target groups of people that are affected, as well as to focus on specific goals and generate ideas to develop a more bio-sustainable project.
After this meeting, we decided to re-examine our projects' SDGs and separate them according to the effect.
Therefore, our project's primary SDGs consist of:
- Life on land, since through project PAGGAIA biodiversity is protected and the reduced load on the soil with fertilizers is ensured
- Zero hunger, a long-term goal of our team, by ensuring food quality and quantity, while reducing agricultural waste and improving the crop yield
- Partnership for the goals, to strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, through
Our secondary SDGs consist of:
- Responsible production and consumption
- Good health and well-being
- Life below water, and specifically protection of marine resources for sustainable development, since via reducing fertilizers' use affects by extension the water table
During this meeting we discussed both among ourselves and with experts how our projects can become more sustainable, we understood the SDGs we are aiming to serve through our projects and had the chance to think even better about the impact we can make through our projects.