COLLABORATIONS

Entrepreneurship event

As described in the Education section, our team organized an Entrepreneurship for iGEM event. During this event, we had a chance to teach other iGEM teams more about entrepreneurship. It was also very interesting to hear what other teams have done on their topic. Furthermore, we offered to help them further develop the entrepreneurial side of their project, when desired.

Integrated Human Practices Surveys

For Integrated Human Practices, our team created a survey to gather more information about GHB spiking and possible product designs. More information about the survey can be found here . In order to have broader input, also from people outside of the Netherlands, we asked other iGEM teams for help. We asked the teams in Table 1 to translate the survey to their native language and spread it on their social media platforms. In return, we helped them to promote their activities or translate or spread their own survey.

Game

For the educational part of our project, we collaborated with iGEM Thessaloniki. This was the perfect collaboration option, since both our teams created a game to teach a younger audience about (synthetic) biology. More information about our game, NUCLEO, can be found here. Together, we discussed the rules and the terms of our collaboration. Then, shared printable versions of each game together with a feedback form. We played each other’s game keeping the topics of the feedback form in mind. A picture of our team playing Thessaloniki’s game and a picture of Thessaloniki’s team playing our game are shown in Figure 2 and Figure 3.

Feedback on Thessaloniki's game

We played the game with 4 people. Overal, it was really fun to play.

Our feedback points were:

• Maybe it would be more interesting if there would be a bit more information about (syn)bio on the cards or in the rules. Now, it didn’t really feel like we learned about biology.
• The colour difference between the bacteria and viruses could maybe be a bit bigger so they can be more distinguishable.
• It now really felt like we are playing an alternative version of halli galli. We suggested them to add some more rules to make the game more unique.
• Also, it could be fun to add cards with 5 of the same symbols instead of just 1-4 (same as in halli galli).

Received feedback on our game

iGEM Thessaloniki gave us feedback using the form that can be found here.

Using their feedback, we were able to further improve our game and be able to judge how understandable it is. This was very valuable, since Thessaloniki was ‘an outsider’, meaning that they were not influenced by the previous decisions or playing rounds with members of our own team. The feedback they provided when playing the game is thereby closer to a regular person playing NUCLEO.

European Meetup

We were invited to the European Meetup in July by the Hamburg iGEM Team. Here, 16 teams participated in three days of seminars, presentations, and a poster session to discuss their projects. We made contact with a wide range of people, who gave us some wonderful feedback. We also attended workshops on business procedures, biosecurity, and human practices, as well as lectures given by professors from different institutions in Europe on various aspects of synthetic biology. Overall, we had a wonderful time and we learned a lot. See Figure 4, a photograph of members of our team in front of our poster.

Dutch Meetup

Next to the European Meetup, we also were present at the Dutch Meetup in July organized by iGEM Wageningen and Eindhoven. During this day, we listened to several lectures and talks by iGEM members and synthetic biology institutes. We also had a chance to present our pitch and get very useful input on our project. Lastly, we brainstormed with other teams about several topics, including the HP and education parts of our projects. See Figure 5 for a photograph of our pitch.