Team:AshesiGhana/Collaborations
COLLABORATIONS
We worked with these fantastic iGEM teams to create an exciting iGEM experience for all of us! To these teams, we’d like to say a huge thank you! Please feel free to also visit their team’s pages and show their projects some support.
iGEM Toulouse
This is our second year of participating in iGEM and we are still a young team by iGEM standards. Thus, we thought that it would be useful to engage in a partnership that would allow us to learn more about iGEM and about working with other iGEM teams. In addition, since we didn’t have access to a lab this year, we thought that the Gold Medal criterion for the partnership would be feasible.
Toulouse (iGEMINI) contacted us because their project deals with vitamin A supplements, to some extent, and they wanted to learn more about vitamin A deficiency in Africa, specifically Ghana.
iGEMINI helped us out with respect to the genetic design of our project, providing some information about entrepreneurship and implementing our project for the real world, and helping us with respect to the human practices aspect of our project.
Read more about our partnership here.
UCL iGEM
UCL iGEM reached out to us because our teams were tackling very similar issues -- for us, it was plastic pollution and coastal erosion and, for them, it was plastic pollution and freshwater scarcity. They believed that there would be potential for a summer-long partnership, and they were right!
This interaction was especially beneficial for the Human Practices and Genetic Design aspects of our project as we had a series of meetings to finetune each other's work. Whereas our team is made up of 90% engineering students, their team had biologists who were willing to help us revisit the genetic design of our project and make some necessary changes to enable next year's team have an optimal iGEM experience. In return, we worked with them on Human Practices and launched a joint survey!
Read more about our partnership here.
EXETER iGEM
We connected with Exeter iGEM through the UCL iGEM team since they realized that we were working on very similar projects. Exeter iGEM were working on calcium carbonate during a part of their project and we believed that we would be able to exchange ideas.
Concerning our contribution as TeamAshesiGhana towards this collaboration, we were requested to assist in the design of a physical part towards their 3D bioprinter solution. Upon further clarification, we went ahead to assess their presented nozzle design, which pointed has a tendency to clog easily over time from residue components cementing. We realized this is potentially due to the heavily intersecting right-angled flow interaction between the two feeds as well as the more contained design of the nozzle chamber. The position of the feeds would result in a much likely circulatory and eventually stagnant print material within the nozzle chamber. And when not in use the nozzle is less likely to fully drain out without the inflow pressure, thus material more easily adheres to the chamber walls and eventually solidifies based on their reaction process. Similar noticed problem is likely to occur in the horizontally oriented nozzle feed.
As such, the chamber and nozzle positions were reshaped and relocated to promote a more merged flow within the nozzle chamber than the opposed intersecting flow. The tilt top feed position of the inlets help produce a natural draining flow through the nozzle decreasing the tendency of adhering residue during and after use. We maintained the inlet and outlet diameters. Included on the outer rim of the inlets is a barb fitting to better seal fit a connecting hose if necessary.
iGEM Team Heidelberg
iGEM Team Heidelberg organized a 2020 iGEM Science Slam and we were honored to participate! It was a great experience to learn how to deliver technical science content in a fun and energetic way to appeal to multiple audiences.
You can find our video here!
We are also proud to say that we won!