Blog with iGEM team Chalmers-Gothenburg
The iGEM adventure is not only creating a project related to synthetic biology but also meeting people, sharing our knowledge with them, and helping each other. This is how the blog “The Transcriptome” was born three years ago.
But first, what is “The Transcriptome” and why was it created? It is a blog managed by the Chalmers-Gothenburg and UNILausanne teams. The aim is to make science more accessible to the masses and, in our case, to spread the word on synthetic biology by writing articles on scientific subjects that interest us weekly. As mentioned on the cover page "it is a place to share science".
It all started with a friendship between two members of the respective teams. While chatting per message, a member of UNILausanne 2020 found out that his friend was also participating in the iGEM competition in the Chalmers-Gothenburg team: what a great opportunity to build something together! This is how this Swiss-Swedish collaboration started. “The Transcriptome” blog was born.
Why did we decide to continue it? First, it was created during the first year of UNIL's participation in iGEM. We immediately liked that the blog already had a past and lived through several teams. Since this, we have felt that being able to continue its history and promote it would be great. Secondly, the blog offered us an excellent opportunity to communicate about biology and iGEM. Indeed, during the whole project, we quickly realized that synthetic biology and iGEM were not well known by the general public. Thus, we thought to make this field more accessible through our articles. Thirdly, we can also mention the social aspect of the blog. Writing the articles in pairs, one team member allowed us to meet new people. It also allowed us to experience another aspect of science: the community. Moreover, it was also great to get in contact with other iGEM teams before the trip to Paris !
As mentioned, we wanted to make our contribution in educating people about science and particularly synthetic biology, because we are convinced that one of the researchers' duties is to make science more accessible. We realized that the blog was an excellent way to do this, because it allowed us to wander in many different subjects, while keeping the focus on the biological aspect. After a few meetings, both teams chose to focus on the application and impact of synthetic biology and technology. Here are a couple of examples of articles : "The future through bioprinting", "How biotechnologies facilitate the production of insulin".
As one of the blog's highlights was sharing sciences, we asked other teams to translate some of our articles. Thanks to them, they are available in German, Japanese, Portuguese, Greek, Spanish. This helped us reach other continents than Europe. Furthermore, articles and translations were promoted on our social networks. We would also like to thank all the other teams who contributed to this great adventure and translated some of our articles :
- Asia : UTokyo (Japan), Waseda_Tokyo (Japan)
- Europe : Uni-Hamburg (Germany), Goettingen (Germany), Bonn-Rheinbach (Germany), Freiburg (Germany), TU_Braunschweig (Germany), Heidelberg (Germany), Patras (Greece), UiOslo_Norway (Norway)
- Latin America : Ollin SynBio (Mexico), UAM (Mexico), USP-EEL-Brazil (Brazil), Unicamp_Brazil (Brazil)
Special thanks to Freiburg (GER) who joined in for writing.
We would like to close this chapter by saying that the blog was a wonderful experience and opportunity in our journey in the iGEM competition, we learned a lot. You can read our articles at the following address : https://thetranscriptome.com/
iGEM Team USAFA
Also, to educate people about science, but this time dedicated to a younger audience, i.e., children, the iGEM team USAFA contacted us to make a coloring book that depicts the different problems we are working on with synthetic biology. They planned to give it to schools in their local area. So we wrote a short text about us and the project. Here you can find their final book (Quagg’out is on page 11) :
Waseda_Tokyo
Through the blog, we also met the iGEM Waseda_Tokyo team. They graciously offered to translate several of our articles in exchange for translating a questionnaire about them into German, Italian, French, and Spanish. This helped them reach more people with the survey for their project. Again, this fits well with our dynamic and idea of sharing science worldwide, so we were delighted to contribute.
Synbio Conference
Wishing to exchange ideas with other teams and to share our experience in the competition along with our common interest in synthetic biology, we collaborated with the teams from EPFL and UZH to create the SynBio Conference event.
The concept of the SynBio Conference allowed us to promote the topic of synthetic biology but also to introduce the concept of the IGEM competition to the public of the University of Zurich, where the event took place.
It was an enriching experience that brought us closer to other teams and allowed us to learn more about their interesting projects. It was, therefore, a solid collaboration sustained by frequent meetings to evaluate the progress of the event's planning.
We also had the chance to have two experts, E. Boni, a PhD Student from the Schaerli Lab of the University of Lausanne, and Edward R. Ballister, a Research Scientist from the Arpaia Lab of Columbia University, in the field of synthetic biology on our side. They allowed us and our audience to learn about the different aspects of this branch of science and how it can be effectively applied in today's world through excellent lectures.
