Team:Brno Czech Republic/Collaborations

Collaborations

As a newly established team, it was challenging for us to get inside the iGEM community. But we dare to say that we've managed and we would love to introduce you to the friends we've made during our journey through iGEM!

Firstly, we would like to mention the iGEM team UofUppsala from the Uppsala University. Uppsala team is working on a cellular biosensor capable of adapting to detect a variety of different analytes. Both of our teams are using the same bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, so we had to deal with similar struggles and issues in the lab. We were so happy, when we found our Swedish friends and were able to discuss everything, give each other tips and tricks and laugh at funny errors we made. Long story short, our videochats were refreshing and taught us a lot. We even decided to invite our friends from Uppsala to participate in the creation of our handbook - a user guide for future iGEM teams working with B. subtilis.

Here, you can check out our handbook How to handle Bacillus subtilis!

Additionally, we collaborated with iGEM team BOKU_Vienna. Our neighboors from Vienna gave us essential mentor presented our projects to each other and provided inspiration and tips for other iGEM related activities, mainly regarding to public outreach. We provided Team Vienna all of our education materials. We also invited team Vienna to be a part of our webinar series. Thanks to them we were able to post an amazing course about gene therapy!

Do you want to find out more about gene therapy? Click here!

Throughout the entirety of our iGEM journey we were part of the Wastewater group, organized by team TU_Kaiserslautern. Every month, we had a zoom meeting, where we discussed what is currently happening in iGEM and shared news with each other. Apart from us and team Kaiserslauntern, the group consists of team Aalto-Helsinki, Stuttgart, UZurich and Darmstadt. Although our project is not directly dealing with wastewater, these sessions were insightful and helped us better manage our iGEM project. We also helped others with their wastewater projects. We provided information about wastewater and wastewater treatment in Czech Republic to them, so they had been able to compare how things are done in different countries. And finally, before Wiki Freeze, we exchanged texts for our main page with team Kaiserslauntern. We translated theirs to Czech and they rewrote ours in German, to make our main home pages welcoming to as many people as possible.

If you are interested in the comparison of wastewater and wastewater treatment, check out the wiki page of TU_Kaiserslauntern!

Because we are the only Czech team participating this year, it was nice that we were contacted by Vít Zemánek. He is from Czech Republic, but studies in Copenhagen. He is a member of team UCopenhagen and he was happy to share his experiences with iGEM. He gave us good tips about organization and modelling.

This year, iGEM team TUDelft had a great idea to create a video to show the possibilities of SynBio and how many people are dedicated to making the world a better place. We absolutely support this idea and we are happy to be able to contribute to this great project.

TU Delft iGEM 2020: The world of SynBio

Another great idea came from iGEM team PYMS_GZ_China. They created a colouring book for children which is explaining what is COVID-19 and spreads awareness about it. They asked us for translation of the book to the Czech. The result can be seen here.

And lastly, we also contributed to the project of iGEM team Korea_HS. The objective of their work was to create a sense of community despide the pandemic and make it easier for teams to reach out to each other. That is why they launched iGEM Quarantine Instagram Project, where they shared teams across the world and briefly presented their project. Just like with the TUDelft project, we were happy to contribute with our admission.

Meet other teams which participated in this challenge by clicking here!