Throughout the course of the year, we collaborated with several iGEM teams, especially from Australia. We’ve participated in or hosted virtual meetups, lab visits, and wiki troubleshooting communications. Later in the project, we faced in the inherent challenges of being a high school team - labs being locked up for holidays - so we were not able to achieve our wet-lab collaboration goals (e.g. GCMS sugar analysis, SDS-PAGE gels).
All Australian iGEM teams met together on Microsoft Teams for a virtual meetup. We spent time introducing ourselves and our project ideas, and tossed around ideas for further collaboration. It was, in a sense, reassuring that everyone was doing iGEM for the first time and knowing we were all on the same boat.
We hosted two of UNSW_Australia’s student team leaders, Eloise and Ezekiel, who came to our school’s lab to present our projects and discuss further possibilities to extend our collaboration.
This was a great opportunity for both teams to present a comprehensive overview of the project, and despite the Jamboree presentations being three months away, it was a good practice of explaining our project to an audience from outside of our team.
We put together a series of slides to present our project to them: (download here)
For our team, it was the first time presenting our project to anyone, and the UNSW team asked us questions regarding our project, such as the process of codon optimisation of yeast protein sequences into E. coli nucleotide sequences. Afterwards, they presented their project idea to us, regarding a synthetic biology solution to cereal rust.
Overall, this was a valuable experience for the teams in receiving external feedback for our projects, and an opportunity to discuss further avenues for mutual collaboration between the two teams.
We reached out to the Sydney_Australia team (University of Sydney; USYD) for a virtual meetup to discuss our project and collaboration ideas.
In a previous Slack message, we had offered to help them validate their parts by measuring fluorescence with our plate reader, but we had encountered the inherent constraints of a high school team - we were on school holidays, and not only was our lab was therefore inaccessible, but also there was no staff supervision available. In fact, we were not even able to send parts to them for their validation (would have been qPCR) as our labs were locked.
Hence, we discussed further dry-lab collaboration ideas, such as a physical meetup of all Australian teams, wiki troubleshooting, and a bioethics debate. Despite these logistics challenges, this session was meaningful as it led to the creation of a Slack channel for all Australian teams, coordinating the details of the physical meetup, and establishing wiki assistance.
During our virtual meetup with the USYD team, we realised that both our teams had one person each working on the wiki, and both needed mutual assistance in incorporating elements into the web pages. Furthermore, our wiki consistently encountered a 404 error for no apparent reason, which asking around in the iGEM Global Slack chat did not resolve.
Hence, we established a direct communication channel on Discord between the wiki managers of each team for sustained mutual assistance.
Our team also reached out to the UNSW team, as they had offered us help with regards to software. We were able to invite him into the Discord group and set up a three-way wiki collaboration group. Mark from the UNSW team helped us troubleshoot and resolve the deployment issue of our website.
We have had a series of meetings throughout the period until the Wiki Freeze, as we were invested in each others’ progress, shared collective concerns and issues, and provided feedback for the overall wiki design.
Our team organised and hosted a virtual meetup for all iGEM teams in Australia, which was made official on the iGEM community meetups page
This was a great opportunity for teams to meet up before the Wiki Freeze and present a near-final version of their projects to everyone, with questions being asked about each others’ projects. We shared our collective anxieties in the big lead-up to the Wiki Freeze, but also our travel plans for the Paris Jamboree.
All in all, it was great being able to present our projects and catch up with the other Australian teams!
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