Meeting 1

Thailand_RIS’s virtual meeting with the VIT Vellore Team marked our team’s first collaboration with another iGem team. We decided to reach out to VIT Vellore due to the fact that both of our teams are tackling a problem within the agricultural field. We began the virtual meeting by presenting our projects and talking about our progress so far in the early stages of the iGEM journey. We also discussed the lack of computer programmers in the team composition in both of our teams, which were mainly dominated by designers and biology-focussed people. Therefore, both of our teams had little skills and knowledge on coding, meaning that making the wiki was going to be a significant challenge. The VIT Vellore team told us that they were involving some short term coding volunteers to help with the wiki aspect, and suggested that we could do the same. After discussing this later with our advisor and the rest of our team, we decided that having “Thailand_RIS iGEM Team Volunteers” to help with the wiki was the right move for us. Thus, this exchange was very valuable for our team.

Meeting 2

For this second meeting with VIT Vellore, we gave each other updates about the progress of our projects. We then moved on to exchanging information about the human practices side of things. For example, we discussed the harmful farming practices in our countries and why farmers continue to follow them, as we believe that in order to solve the problem, we must not only give them a viable solution, but must also address why they continue to stick with the harmful methods. For this, we mainly discussed pesticide use, stubble burning, and antibiotic use. Based on this, we also explored how we could implement our product in such a way that farmers would actually use it, such as through raising awareness and ease of implementation. This was a very valuable discussion for our team as it offered a crucial perspective: many products have been put on the market as an alternative for pesticides, yet pesticides are still the dominant way of controlling pests. What are the (legal, environmental, cultural, practical, financial, etc.) pitfalls that prevent these alternatives from actually replacing pesticides on a large scale. This realization encouraged us to think of how we could make our product overcome these pitfalls to achieve widespread adoption. Finally, we ended our meeting by suggesting human practice initiatives that each team could do so that we could better address our pitfalls. For example, VIT Vellore suggested that it would be greatly beneficial for us to interview farmers like those who would actually be using our products, not just experts in the field.

On July 15, TRIS_iGEM held a collaboration meeting with ASIJ_Tokyo, a team from Japan. The meeting began with each team introducing their members, followed by brief presentations of the respective team’s project. An area of discussion we focused on was modeling, since both of our teams intended to model proteins and it was a subject that all of us were unfamiliar with. An aspect we talked about was potential modeling ideas that would enhance our respective projects, and also the tools we could utilize to complete such modeling. We finalized this topic of discussion by agreeing to support each other through the modeling process.

Afterwards, we began discussing current and future collaboration initiatives, offering advice to one another regarding them. For instance, we asked for their insight on our planned instagram project where teams would take short vlogs of a day in their lives.

Following that, we talked about our planned educational initiatives. Since we had the same target demographics (ES and MS kids), we exchanged ideas regarding how we can best engage them in our lessons. In particular, we discussed using skits to engage the young students. Finally, we wrapped up the meeting by exchanging educational materials and asking for their help in promoting our Synbio for Agriculture Team Meet-Up, which was very helpful due to their large following on instagram.

In our meeting with team Korea_HS, the goal was to receive feedback and assistance. We began by introducing ourselves and sharing our projects. Afterwards, we discussed our respective possible collaboration projects, with team Korea_HS presenting their badges project and inviting us to join the iGEM slack community. This community allows us to communicate with other teams from all over the world, granting us the facility to announce possible projects and events we are planning. Lastly, team Korea_HS also helped promote our Synbio for Agriculture meetup, enabling us to reach a wider audience of teams and connect with them!

We participated in Aboa's Emoji Challenge, hosted in honor of World Emoji Day, which took place on July 17th. Participants were to create an emoji that represented their team project, and send it to Aboa with a short description of the topic. After having done this, Aboa published our emojis as part of an emoji quiz on their instagram page. For our emoji, we decided to add rice to represent agriculture and Thailand. The bacteria and the shield represents our project: using antimicrobial peptides expressed in E. coli to protect crops from the Ralstonia bacteria. Finally, we decided to use the sunglasses emoji to convey the fun and chaotic nature of our High School level team, consisting of a bunch of teenagers learning the ropes of science! Overall, we had a lot of fun participating in the unique collaboration activity, which was a creative way to express/get to know different projects and their teams.

We participated in the Instagram Video Project hosted by Greece team, Patras Med. This required us to film a short video introducing our team and the iGEM track we competed in. We began by discussing the inspirations behind our participation and project, as well as giving a brief overview of it. This was a new and fresh experience that granted us the ability to advocate for our causes while also connecting with teams from all over the world through social media.

On July 24, we hosted the Synbio for Agriculture meetup. Prior to this, our team noticed that many of the iGEM meetups being hosted were categorized by demographic and/or geography. While this connects teams with similar experiences, we believe that it is more beneficial to gather teams tackling similar problems. As our project revolves around agriculture, we decided to host the Synbio for Agriculture Team Meet Up through a virtual platform. This event gathered iGEM 2022 teams tackling problems related to agriculture to come together to connect, present, and discuss their projects, as well as ask for suggestions/feedback. The meeting started off by initiating icebreakers to learn more about the members of each team. Then, each team presented for approximately 15 minutes on their project and their progress so far, including their human practices and collaboration components. Intriguing questions about each project were then asked in order to provide more engaging discussions, while each team received feedback on their project and presentation by the other participating teams. It was an extremely beneficial experience, getting to learn more about teams who shared similar interests in utilizing novel methods to tackle the problems currently faced in the agricultural field. Moreover, it served as a basis for future collaborations between teams that came to our meetup. Thailand_RIS would like to give a huge thank you to all the teams that participated in our meetup: UBC iGEM, iGEM IISER Pune, Imperial College London, iGEM INSA Lyon, and iGEM Patras.

The “This or That” Instagram Project was another collaboration initiative of our team. The goal of this project was to allow teams to get to know each other before meeting at the Giant Jamboree in October through a fun, carefree, and interactive method. For this project, we made a template Instagram story with words that could potentially describe an iGEM team. Teams were encouraged to repost this template onto their Instagram stories and highlight the words that best describe them. They were also asked to add an audio that represented their team. Each team tagged three other teams, so we were able to reach a large number of different iGEM 2022 teams world wide. Through this, we were able to connect with different teams and we hope that participating teams enjoyed this project as much as we did. Thank you to all the teams who joined in on our “This or That” Instagram Project.

Korea_HS's Badge Project was one of their collaboration initiatives that they introduced to our team during our previous meetup. When the project was officially launched, our team was very eager to participate. This project allowed iGEM teams to order custom badges through Korea_HS that showcased their respective team and their project. We felt that this was a fitting project to participate in since it enabled our team to wear matching accessories throughout the Giant Jamboree. For our badge, we decided to simply use our logo since we felt that it best represented our team and project, as the agricultural-related designs in Thai artwork displayed our Thai roots as well as how our project is agriculture related. We look forward to our completed badges being shipped to us before we depart Thailand for Paris, where we hope to see other iGEM teams wearing their creative badges.

iGEM Tec-Chihuahua reached out to us via Instagram inviting us to join their “Comic Coloring Book” Project. This collaboration project incorporated both human practices and educational outreach. Each team created a 2-page long English colorless comic book centered around their iGEM project. These comic books were then compiled all together and distributed by iGEM Tec-Chihuahua to elementary and middle school students, aged 6-12. Our team had a lot of fun creating a story that conveyed our project. While creating the comic, we had to be thoughtful of the target audience. Keeping in mind that we were trying to engage young kids with limited scientific knowledge, we made the drawings entertaining and kept it simple. In our opinion, this was a very unique project that helped young kids learn about synthetic biology, current problems in the world, and the application of synthetic biology. When we received the compilation of all the completed comics, we were mesmerized by the wide variety of art styles and we greatly enjoyed learning about other team’s projects in such a manner. In fact, the comic book that we created was used as part of our educational outreach with third graders at our school, and the students had a lot of fun coloring the book and reading the exciting, yet educational story.

Together with GEMS Taiwan, we launched the Infographic Exchange Project. Our goal with this project was to exhibit the vast applications of synthetic biology in solving current problems that we face in the world, with the hopes of raising awareness for these problems, inspiring and educating the public, and reducing the stigma towards synthetic biology. To achieve this, we invited iGEM teams around the world to design an infographic in English about their project in a simple and engaging manner where the general public would be able to quickly understand. However, we quickly realized the language barriers that would prevent many communities from being able to comprehend our infographic. To combat this, we teamed up with Korea_HS and UiOslo. Thailand_RIS, GEMS Taiwan, Korea_HS, and UiOslo translated each submitted infographic from English to Thai, Mandarin, Korean, and Norwegian, respectively. We communicated regularly to organize and execute this project through instagram DMs as well as virtual meetings. These infographics were later distributed to our audience both electronically (through Instagram) and on paper during our educational outreach workshops. We would like to send a big thank you to all the teams that joined in on this project! We loved seeing all of your amazing work!

As we were wrapping up our iGEM journey, iGEM Guelph reached out to us after seeing a collaboration posting on Slack in order to have a virtual meeting with us. Since we were both first-time High School teams, it sparked their interest, as well as the fact that we were both trying to create some sort of biopesticide. We started off the meeting by presenting each of our projects and asking questions. We also discussed our planned implementation and how our human practice initiatives shaped our project. Our team was especially interested in how iGEM Guelph’s product could be altered to target specific pest species. Additionally, we were also intrigued by the improvements they were looking forward to make after iGEM, such as adding a kill-switch and improving it so that the promoter could be triggered by a pathway set off by the pest, so that farmers would not have to manually spray their crops with a specific sugar to “turn on” the pesticide-like abilities of the bacteria. We also had a meaningful conversation about the steps that each of our projects needed to take in order to successfully commercialize our product, such as the different regulations that we would have to go through to launch our product in our countries. Furthermore, we shared similar struggles with transformation in the lab. Another problem that we both faced in our projects was the potential for our product to unintentionally harm non-target organisms. Before concluding the meeting, we reflected on our iGEM journeys thus far. iGEM Guelph was particularly interested in our experiences of iGEM while trying to balance high school. When we brought up the fact that we were still a bit lost on the “Parts” aspect of iGEM, iGEM Guelph thoroughly explained it to us, further giving us suggestions on what parts we could add to the iGEM registry, what parts we could modify, and how we could showcase this process as part of Engineering Success. This was an incredibly valuable exchange for us and was instrumental in helping us complete Parts-related criterias, such as Contribution and Improvement on an Existing Part, in addition to Engineering success. Overall, the meeting was incredibly informative, thought-provoking, and enjoyable.