Team:FSU/Collaborations

Collaborations

University of Florida (Gainesville, Florida)

As our neighboring state school, we sought out a collaboration with the University of Florida to unify our universities during this unprecedented year. When we first met with UF, they wanted help with their Human Practices because they believed it had room for improvement. We met many times to discuss our projects from a Human Practices vantage point and the main issue both of our teams had was a lack of contacts. Many of the government agencies and local experts we were trying to contact we extremely busy with the pandemic and it made it difficult to receive credible responses. On top of that, we were not able to visit many locations or talk in person with consumers of our project. We worked together to find phone numbers, emails, and organizations that would benefit our Human Practices and finally started getting some responses back from various sources. Because we accomplished our goal and improved upon each other’s Human Practices, we decided to work on another project together.


Our two teams are the only schools in Florida who participate in iGEM annually, so we decided to work on a joint Science Communication collaboration to promote the competition to schools in our state. Our first meetings were discussions of what we wanted to encapsulate in the video, from talking about our previous projects and placements in the competition to how iGEM works and the teamwork it requires. The FSU iGEM team created the bulk of the script, gathered footage and narrated our half of the video, and the UF iGEM team edited the video. We met many times afterwards to discuss changes to the video to make it more impactful and also began reaching out to high schools in Florida to see if we could show our video and host a Q&A session after. We showed the video to James S. Rickards High school in Tallahassee, FL and College Academy at Broward College in Davie, FL. We also met with UF's Design team to discuss both of our models. Because neither one of us had access to a laboratory, modeling became one of the most important parts of our project to determine if our solution was feasible. We were struggling to find certain parameters for our model, and after discussion with UF, they seemed to have the same issue. UF’s team needed information regarding the degradation rate, translational rate, and concentration of TetR. We needed the transport rate of erythromycin and EreA/EreB. We were able to help each other find these numbers and thus able to finish our models working together.

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (Tirupati Andhra Pradesh, Tirupati)

The pandemic provided extremely unique challenges for this year‘s iGEM season. However, one of the benefits of this year was being able to reach out to worldwide universities for collaboration purposes. We initially met over video chat with IISER Tirupati on May 31st to discuss a potential collaboration since our projects both cover antibiotic resistance. They were fortunate enough to collect data before the pandemic hit, so they were ahead of our project. We were still searching for a solution to antibiotic resistance in Florida’s waterways. Because they were ahead of us, the IISER Tirupati team provided us with possible routes we could go when determining our solution. Although there was a large time difference between our teams, we managed to communicate when possible to bounce ideas off each other. In our next meeting on August 2nd, our team had finally determined the bare bones of a solution that would include genetically engineered bacteria. The IISER Tirupati team was once again ahead of us in the design phase and shared their bacteria’s mechanism of action, including the promoters and other genes that would be included to break down antibiotics in chicken feces. They also had a rough idea of a proposed implementation. Because of this, IISER Tirupati took on a mentorship role towards our team and guided us to develop a strong device to tackle antibiotic resistance in wastewater treatment plants. They encouraged us to think of how our solution could be implemented in the treatment plant, including constraints and cost of implementation. After this meeting, we were inspired to get back on track, contact more treatment plant directors for their input, and develop a solution that would benefit both the environment and the consumer.