Team:Gaston Day School/Collaborations
Collaborations
Collaboration and Meetup
UK iGEM Meetup
We attended the UK iGEM meetup in June 2020 and gave a 10 min presentation on our project. Overall, it was great to stay together during the pandemic. We are sincerely thankful for this opportunity to develop new design ideas, receive feedback, give out troubleshooting advice, and most importantly, develop collaborations. We started our collaborations with St. Andrews and Imperial College London soon after the meetup.
German iGEM Meetup
We attended the German iGEM meetup in July 2020 and presented our project during the poster session. We met with a couple of our collaborators and went to their presentation. This meetup allowed us to practice virtual poster sessions, so we would get a brief idea about how the Virtual Jamboree is going to look. The highlight of the day was that our team leader George Luan got second place in his first-ever Wizard game at Game Night (Afternoon).
Mid-Atlantic iGEM Meetup
In response to Team William and Mary’s invitation, we attended the Mid - Atlantic iGEM Meetup 2020. We made a presentation for our project and learned about some advanced concepts like the idea of microcompartments in bacterial cells, which may facilitate our project in the future. Our team member Matilda Ziegler also attended the human practice workshop and gained insights in integrated human practices.
Imperial College London 2020
We met with Gabriel Swallow from Team ICL at the UK Meetup and he later offered us a comprehensive modeling guide and the basic coding frame for our gene expression model. They held a couple of tutorial sessions for us and gave us basic knowledge in ODE and guided us to retrieve the correct transcription rate parameter. They also provided us insight on project management skills and wet lab designs. We express sincere thanks to Team ICL for their instructions on modeling and would love to keep in touch with them.
St. Andrews 2020
We reached a collaboration with Team St. Andrews after the UK Meetup. We contacted each other through email and eventually scheduled a couple meetings together. They provided us suggestions on how to optimise their gene circuit: in particular how to handle the large cluster size of the phaseolotoxin production cluster we were implementing and its potential toxicity to the chassis organism, E. coli. In addition, they introduced a NetLogo model on predicting the spread and the management cost of kudzu. We also listened to the introduction of their project and both the UK and German Meetups and provided some troubleshooting on the safety aspect of their project.
Our team leader George Luan is an acquaintance of Siyu Yang from Team Hainan China and when he realized that the projects of both Hainan and St. Andrews are related to coal bleachings, he introduced Team St. Andrews to Team Hainan China. We were glad that these teams finally reached a partnership.
TAU Israel
We met Team TAU Israel on the iGEM Slack Channel. They kindly offered to help us with the MATLAB software. Their Team Leader Karin briefly introduced us to the tools available in MATLAB for these purposes: the SimBiology tool and Curve Fitting tool respectively. They offered to have another meeting later if needed, but luckily, we figured about how to build our model in SimBiology with their first tutorial. In addition, they presented our group's project and we were impressed by their idea. Their project on genetic stability will offer us some accurate parameters for our gene expression model.
Email: igem@gastonday.org
Instagram: @gastondayigem
