Team:HKUST/Collaborations
Collaborations
Collaborations
In this project period, we collaborated and formed partnerships with different iGEM teams to exchange ideas for polishing our project and also achieve common goals together. We are more than excited to receive support from different teams.
City University of Hong Kong (CityU) iGEM team 2020 PLASTILICIOUS
We collaborate and form a partnership with the CityU iGEM team in the project period as we have similar goals for the project we are working on -- solving plastic pollution problems in the world. Their team aims to treat different plastic waste with the bacterias they are testing with, while our team focuses more on developing replacement for synthetic fibres which reduces production of microfibres.
Both of our teams would like to raise public awareness on these environmental issues, and introduce them to the possibilities and feasibility of synthetic biology as a solution. Previously when the CityU team organised a talk for the high school joint-school team HK_CPU-WFN-WYY, Synthetic Biology: Current Technology and Career, they invited us to join as guest speakers and share our insights on the plastic pollution problem and career pathway for environment-related work in Hong Kong. Recently, we co-organised a public environment talk, How Can We Solve Plastic Pollution: The Conservation and Synbio Approaches, together with a guest speaker Gordon So the Conservation Officer of World Wide Fund for Nature, Hong Kong. It was targeted at the general public and we hoped to increase the public’s exposure to environmental issues and different methods to solve them, as well as urging them to be green-adopters. Both of our teams were in charge of the event promotion, but the CityU team was responsible for event poster design in particular and our team was the main contact point with the guest speaker as well as the event manager.
Screenshot of the interactive session in the high school talk
Poster of the public environment talk co-organised with the CityU team
Apart from these, we also held a video project with the CityU team on YouTube. It is a series called More About Genetic Engineering which introduces different types of genetic engineering technologies to the public. As their team was not familiar with making animation, in this project they wrote us the script for the videos and our team animated based on the script and discussion with their team to understand their expectation for the video. It was a fun collaboration.
In the past few months, we also continuously contacted each other for idea exchange on experimental planning, computer modelling and other administrative matters. We are glad to have them as a partner to support and work together for iGEM 2020.
The University of Hong Kong (HKU) iGEM team 2020 EVOLVE
We also collaborate with the HKU iGEM team as we seek possibilities of applying findings from their project to our own project. The HKU team is trying to build a bacteria expression system which can express different bacteria at a pre-set ratio. We believe this would be useful for our project for expressing different ratios of chromoproteins in our hagfish intermediate filaments. However, with the pandemic situation, both of our teams did not have sufficient time to generate lab results to further push forward our collaboration. Hopefully we could continue the collaboration in the second phase of our project.
Despite the situation, the HKU iGEM team organised a virtual Symposium Advances in Synthetic Biology. We were happy to join this large-scale event and share our iGEM project with other Hong Kong iGEM teams and the public. We also gained meaningful insights from the keynote speakers in the symposium. We look forward to more collaboration with their team in the future.
Poster of the symposium organised by the HKU team