In addition to making progress in our own lab, we have established mutually beneficial contacts with other iGEM teams. Some of the collaborative activities we are involved in are described below.
cooperation
With Thinker_Shenzhen, we both helped each other during these six months. We have provided each other with important advice on project design, experiments, biosafety, etc. We also provided them with our lysis panels for experimental improvement and our low-cost assays for their offline practical part. In addition, we co-organized educational lectures on biosafety and synthetic biology.
We had another exchange about sustainability, and through this exchange, Thinker_Shenzhen suggested to us that the complementarity of our two teams is one of the key points emphasized in SDG17. This became a deeper path for our sustainability board eventually.
After that, we again held an online educational lecture on synthetic biology with Thinker_Shenzhen. The purpose of this seminar was to introduce synthetic biology to students interested in biology and to stimulate their interest in joining iGEM as iGEMers through the experiences we have shared in the iGEM Community. In addition, we helped to create a promotional video and poster during the preparation of the lecture. In return, Thinker_Shenzhen finished collecting the video footage, as well as organizing the presentation materials, and creating the PPT. After the cooperation, our two teams bonded once again and deepened our relationship.
Cooperation
We spoke with SZ-SHD offline about our respective projects. After we explained our project, SZ-SHD suggested to us that the E. coli that was still active after our centrifugation could cause biosafety problems. At the same time, a similar problem was previously considered in the project from SZ-SHD and they presented us with their solution to treat the inactive residues with suicide elements, so they proposed to us to treat our centrifuged residual E. coli in a similar way to enhance the biosafety of the project.
For Team Thinker_China, since this was our first year in this competition, SZ-SHD started off by giving us some advice on how to progress in this competition. After the presentation, SZ-SHD checked our schedule and gave comments accordingly, telling us what was missing or what aspects of us had been well thought out. For example, they suggested that we get more professionals to interview in order to increase the credibility of our project, as too many of our interviews focused on the company and the market. They believed that such behavior did not mean that our board at HP was adequate. We are also glad to have their advice and we feel that these are passed down from generation to generation in the iGEM Community. After all, isn't iGEM all about making connections and helping each other? View Their Page
Cooperation
In September, Thinker_China and Thinker_Shenzhen invited BJWZ-China, RDFZ-China, LZU-HS-Pro-A, LZU-HS-Pro-B, XHD-Wuhan-Pro-China, to hold a biosafety sharing event. The theme of the event was about laboratory safety, legislative issues, and other aspects. The sharing event is also an important part of iGEM as the event aims at mutual help, communication, and progress among iGEM Community members.
The designated date for our team's online event was August 12, and we used the Tencent Conference App to connect online with six other iGEM teams from this year. During the exchange session, we refined our shortcomings by referring to our respective teams' current considerations in lab safety. In addition, we also communicated with each other about the direction of our teams' development in the safety segment, which includes the areas of project safety, social safety, and experimental drug safety. Finally, we benefited a lot from this meeting, we have more inspiration for our own team's development direction in the safety segment, such as: legislation, selection of high-safety experimental materials, and plant safety in the future business development layout. The most important thing is that the exchange with other teams has deepened our pursuit to help each other in iGEM Community to progress together.
To sum up, this year we worked with several iGEM teams in an effort to bring out the second core of this competition - connectivity. For the experiments, we worked mainly with the Thinker-Shenzhen team. With the Thinker-Shenzhen team, we helped each other with experiments through workshops, multiple visits, and hands-on demonstrations because of similarities in the experimental aspects of our project themes. 2017 team TUDelft (2017) was our source of inspiration in regards to hardware and we had ongoing conversations and workshops on the topic of simple centrifuges. At the same time, we had previous discussions about how we should make our educational activities more absorbable for our audience, and we were inspired after attending CCiC to eventually create a science education brochure, by creating a simple science brochure about the relevant content of the current lecture before each education, so that our audience could have another advance understanding of what we were talking about before the lecture, and since then this method has been used through The feedback from the event has shown us that it has been very useful. The guidance from SZ-SHD is not to be underestimated, as it helped us a lot in our experimental design and planning for the iGEM competition; for iGEM, cooperation is something we should never give up.