Collaborations with other iGEM teams
A very important part of the iGEM competition is the collaboration between iGEM teams all around the globe. This is a great opportunity to get to know other teams, the projects they are working on and present our own project ideas and progress. This helps with coming up with new ideas and solving problems together by cooperating as each team has different strengths, capabilities and equipment. It also allows us to form a network for future projects with scientists all over the world. This year was very challenging for all of us due to the pandemic. But as we see every challenge as a chance, we focused on online meetings, having a lot of mail contact and taking part in as many Instagram challenges as no iGEM Hamburg team before. It was great fun and a pleasure for all of us to get to know many other teams and projects which also helped us to improve our own project as well. In the following sections, you can find an overview of all our collaborations and explore what we did this year.
Imperial College London - Software Collaboration
We contacted the team at Imperial College as we needed some help to model our project. It all started out as a collaboration but turned into a partnership. To find out more about are collaboration with this team click on the button below.
Düsseldorf Postcard Exchange
One of the first collaborations we took part in was organised by the iGEM team Düsseldorf. Each team was initially tasked to design a postcard that would capture the essence of its research or synthetic biology in general - preferably with funny undertones.
A significant number of copies was then sent by each team to the iGEM team Düsseldorf, which then arranged them into albums to be redistributed across all teams, in order to give everyone some visibility on the research landscape in this year's iGEM projects. We received over 30 postcards from all over the world with incredible designs giving a first idea of this year's projects and promoting the visibility of synthetic biology as we could share them with family and friends. We enjoyed going through all these greetings and laughed more than once very loud.
Surveys
As many teams want to gather information on people's opinion about certain topics, which related to their projects are related to, they started creating surveys and sent them to iGEM teams all over the world. All of our members filled out these surveys and sent them to family members and friends to spread the survey to as many people as possible and make them much more representative.
These are the surveys we filled out:
- Kings College London: Whose voice gets heard in iGEM?
- Bielefeld: Survey on contraception of women
“iGEM explores” Ulm
The iGEM Team Ulm initiated a collaboration called “iGEM explores” and we got the great chance to take part in it. The idea behind it was to create a small video or presentation about our project and share it with the other teams which took part. It was a great possibility to learn more about other projects and ideas. This collaboration also included sharing the presentations and videos of the teams on social media. This serves as a kind of advertisement for participating teams. The goal was that all the other teams get to know the projects.
Proteins in music challenge Bilkent-UNAMBG
We also took part in the very creative #proteinsinmusicchallenge of the Bilkent-UNAMBG iGEM team. The idea was to create a melody of a protein of importance from our project. For this, each amino acid is assigned to a (musical) note based on its residual mass. We did this for the following of our parts:
- Hammerhead ribozyme
- YFP
- Hepatitis delta virus ribozyme
- STAR
- terminator
Online Meetups
Especially in a time where meeting others in person is not the best option, online meetups give a great opportunity to exchange and get more inspiration. We enjoyed a lot chatting and discussing our ideas and projects. All these were great chances to get into the whole iGEM competition and feeling the team spirit all around the world was the best motivation you can get to work on.
Our team took part at the German Meetup hosted by the iGEM Marburg-Giessen (https://igemmarburg.com/meetup) and at the Global Meetup hosted by iGEM HQ. For the German Meet up we designed a poster for a presentation session and also made a team introduction video. This video also won the 1st prize and we are now the great owners of these cute and cuddly E.Coli.
Also, we are very proud of one of our advisors who won the fantastic prize of a treasure hunt. It's always good to know to have such a competent advisor in our team! For the Global Meetup, we also made a short video.
Other Collaborations
- iGEM Hamburg: Night Shift Challenge
- iGEM Vienna: Emoji Challenge
- iGEM NCKU-Tainan, iGEM 2020 Bingo
- MSP iGEM, #naturephotographyday
- iGEM Moscow Team: Flash Mob - We all are united in time and space!
