In November, we attended the Jamboree Spanish meet-up 2021 at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Zaragoza, organized by iGEM UNIZAR. In addition to following the Giant Jamboree held online due to COVID-19, we talked with the different Spanish iGEM teams about synthetic biology at the national level.
As our project was focused on a therapeutic to treat depression we wanted to see the current situation of this mental illness. Thus, a survey was made to examine Spain’s mental health. Not only were we keen on knowing its current situation, but also, its evolution before and after the pandemic, and, mainly, the lockdown. In addition, we shared our survey with the Delft team in Greece to get some data on the international situation.
TecCEM organized this year’s iGEM Hispanic meetup where we had the incredible chance to talk about design to use synthetic biology to convert subproducts of the food industry to serotonin. This was a meetup where all the hispanic iGEM teams can share their work and experiences through the competition, to network and be part of activities that could sum up to their projects.
iGEM TU Delft sent us a survey to participate in a study about chemical submission by GHB. They were designing a GHB detector that will end the use of GHB for chemical submission. The study intends to examine the opinion of the people about this fact and about our detector. We filled out the survey to give our favorite detector’s design as well as translated the survey so it could have a higher impact in the hispanic world.
When going through all the possible IGEM collaborations we came across Exeter iGEM’s incredible AccessiLab Challenge. The challenge consisted of uploading to social media photos showing different features in the lab to facilitate access for people with reduced mobility. We were shocked and proud to see all the accessibility features our university has. As a society it should be extremely important for labs and institutions to equate all these kinds of access to progress in the development of science. Funny enough one of our members ended up in crutches and had zero problems getting to the lab.
Before the trip to the Grand Jamboree in Paris we wanted to have a last meeting with the iGEM BioGalaxy team, the other iGEM team from our city. In this meeting, both teams presented our projects, shared our difficulties in the last months of work and talked about how we face the last weeks. This meeting was very enriching because we were able to compare the performance between a team of high school students and a team of university students, each with their strengths and difficulties.
Promoted by the iGEM-Team Düsseldorf, we participated in the postcard project. This collaboration between dozens of teams consisted of the design of a postcard related to your project. On the front side a drawing related to either iGEM, synthetic biology or each team's project had to be implemented. On the back a description of the iGEM project had to be written. We printed multiple copies and they were sent all around the world! It was an incredible opportunity to learn about the different teams’ plans as well as mixing together the concepts of art and science.