Collaborations

Intro

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Throughout our project, we put an emphasis on collaboration with groups near and far. To our team, collaborations represent an opportunity to enrich our project with the experience and diversity of other iGEM groups. The differences were able to enhance our projects and provide a new perspective, it was also fulfilling to see the similarities that the different teams experienced throughout the iGEM journey. We attempted to collaborate with as many groups as possible, starting with those within our own country and ending with diverse countries from all around the world.

Mini Jamboree

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We were honored to host the other two Israeli iGEM teams, iGEM BGU-Israel and iGEM TAU-Israel at our campus for what we call the “mini jamboree”. This event was meant to resemble the grand jamboree on a smaller scale. Each of the groups presented their projects, along with a fifteen-minute question session. In addition, we invited two guest lecturers: The first is Anna Shreder, a debate coach who gave us a lecture about the art of presenting in front of an audience, preparing us for the grand jamboree. The second is Dr. Michael Levy from the faculty of Biotechnology and Food engineering that gave us a lecture about his field of research in synthetic biology - engineering ribosomes. This event was a fantastic opportunity to become more comfortable in presenting the projects as well as being capable of answering questions from our peers. This opened Israel's teams to one another in the spirit of camaraderie and allowed various ideas to be explored under the umbrella of synthetic biology and its toolkit.

Podcast

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We reached out to other teams to hear about their projects, ideas and experiences. After hearing from a few teams, we realized that we may not be the only people interested in these projects. This led us to the idea of creating an educational podcast centered around synthetic biology and iGEM groups specifically. We invited three groups from around the world: iGEM Latvia-Riga, iGEM Athens and iGEM NYU-Abu-Dhabi ; each group told us about their project and some of the challenges they faced. You can read more about our podcast in the Education & Communication page.
You can listen to our podcast, just click on the advertisement post photo.

meeting to record our podcast with Athens Team

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Lavtia-Riga: OraCell

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As explained on previous pages, we lacked a satisfactory solution for detecting and quantifying decursin, which is how OraCell was born. More information on this can be found on the measurement page. We realized that quantification of metabolites is a problem not unique to our project. Therefore, we began to search for fellow iGEM teams in the biomanufacturing track, whose molecules could potentially affect the Hippo pathway as well. We reached out to the Latvian iGEM 2022 team who are producing a molecule known as crocin, which recent studies have shown impacts the Hippo pathway in a similar manner to decursin^[1]. After explaining the mechanism of our assay to them, we offered to establish a calibration curve using a sample sent by them, for possible future detection and measurement of crocin. They have sent us a sample for setting up the first experiment. Furthermore, this is also the first time that a Latvian group has participated in iGEM, which made our collaboration with their team even more impactful and significant. As a fellow group in the biomanufacturing track, we were able to discuss our work and models and learn from each other.

iGEM Challenge

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As a part of the education aspect of our project, we created a virtual escape room with a synthetic biology theme. The escape room was set at a challenging level and therefore, prior to the escape room, a lesson in synthetic biology was given to high school students. Since the escape room was set at such a high level, we were able to share it with fellow iGEM groups as a friendly competition. We sent out the link to the escape room on the iGEM Slack group as well as on our Instagram with the top three groups being awarded a prize to be handed out at the grand jamboree in Paris.

Mock Jamboree

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In addition to our in-person meetup, we will plan to host a virtual meetup with the various groups we interacted with throughout our project: Athens, Latvia and United Arab Emirates. The meetup will take place following the wiki freeze. That way, the projects and presentations are expected to be in the final stages. This allows the mock jamboree to act as a dry run for the grand jamboree and make the teams more comfortable in presenting their final projects. We are excited for this meeting and hope it will be beneficial for all of the groups involved.