This year, our team bonded with fellow iGEMers to bring the scientific publishing process closer to teams. During the season we wrote a scientific article for MSP-Maastricht team Journal, reviewed other teams work as well as received very constructive feedback from two teams on how to improve the presentation and implementation of our project.
This fruitful partnership was very meaningful and drived our team to investigate deeper into our project. We had to think early on how to present our work in an understandable manner, and the received feedback pinpointed the weak spots. This helped us learn how to better emphasise the main ideas behind the project and prepared our team for the wiki freeze.
It also stimulated to look around and check what other teams do. Unsurprisingly, while reviewing other teams articles we eventually digged into their project’s topic. It was very exciting to learn what other teams are working on, how they creatively tackle the world’s problems and come up with elegant solutions.
We have reviewed the articles of two teams. Ciencias_UNAM team made a meta-analysis of iGEM projects related to development of molecular delivery systems such as virus-like particles (VLP). Another team, UteRus, created an inexpensive method for diagnosis of endometriosis. We were glad to help fellow teams to improve their text and learn more about different topics in synthetic biology. Even though their topics are not directly connected to our project, we got interested in the presented fields and were happy to assist fellow iGEM teams to improve their projects.
Two teams also reviewed our article. Both Aalto-Helsinki and Aachen helped us improve our article considerably by providing us with well-reasoned advice. Notably, Aalto-Helsinki mentioned that it was unclear whether the model of an increased cofactor availability and its effect on lipid production will be implemented in our project. Since NADPH plays an important role in fatty acid biosynthesis, we thought that considering its effect on lipid production would make our model more comprehensive. To learn more about how this could be done in practice, we contacted Junling Guo, the author of the article Light-driven fine chemical production in yeast biohybrids. Prof. Guo provided us with a way to estimate NADPH/NADP+ ratio in the cell. The provided insights are very important for our project’s future implementation.
