Collaborations
While this year’s IGEM season is almost at its end, we can look back to a year full of collaborations and fruitful meet-ups. We were able get to know many teams and people - and could learn a lot from each other. At the beginning, the pandemic had come for all of us and with it many restrictions. We could no longer work together in the laboratories, joint meetings were nearly impossible and after a few weeks everyone realized that the pandemic would last longer than we imagined. So we had to look for alternatives on how we could carry out our project this year despite the pandemic and also how to get to know other teams to start collaborations. Notwithstanding, we have found new possibilities, carried out all collaborations online and thus mastered this year.
Global meetup
From 20. to 22.08 the Global Meet-Up took place. Under the motto “connect, collaborate and celebrate“. We met teams from all over the world. We shared information, presented projects and hosted events. It was a lot of fun and of course very informative. We held a workshop at 6 pm CET called “How to bake an igem roll“. In the lifestream we showed how to bake a biscuit roll with the IGEM logo on it. You can still watch our stream as it was made available by IGEM. In the end, the roll had to be eaten by our whole team - and it was super delicious! We also have some photos for you:
German meetup
On July 4th and 5th there was a German Meetup kindly organized by the teams from Marburg and Gießen and the German Association for Synthetic Biology (GASB e.V.). Most of the German teams and some international teams met on Slack to celebrate 20 years of synthetic biology. It was mainly about the exchange of our projects, sharing information and interesting workshops. There were talks from famous scientists, a fun game night and there were also some competitions where you had to submit a poster or two different videos. Afterwards , all teams voted for the best posters and videos. We took the 3rd position in the GASB video competition and we are very happy about it. You can watch the video again here:
Thank you Gießen and Marburg for the organization!
IJet
The IGEM Team Aachen started a collaboration called IJet - the paper plane that unites, this year: A paper plane flies from team to team and around the world. It travels through different countries, continents and time zones but it shows us, that we all share the same sky. The paper plane keeps flying and spreads positivity to the world. We also had a lot of fun making the short video and felt connected to the other teams all around the world. Click here to get to the result.
Thank you Aachen!
Postcard
This year, the IGEM Team Düsseldorf organized a postcard collaboration and we gladly participated. They collected postcards from many IGEM teams explaining and presenting their projects. While designing our card, we discovered our little mascot: The super sensor cell. It explains in a small short comic how our project works. When we later received the postcards from IGEM teams everywhere around the world, we were very pleased. It was super interesting to find out more about the other project ideas and to see, what could be possible in the future. Besides, the postcards all look beautiful and we will keep them after IGEM as an reminder of this year. Take a look at our postcard:
Thank you Düsseldorf for organizing!
Flashmob
On 17th May, the IGEM Team Moscow at the Central European Meet-Up spontaneously called for a digital flashmob. We participated immediately. Each IGEM team should post a contribution with a map on which their own country is marked and the #igemap_flashmob on Instagram at 5 pm local time. The motto was: "We are all united in time and space". Thus, IGEM should become more visible for the public. Under the # you can still see how common this competion is, but you can also see one picture here:
Thank you Moscow!
Wiki Mentoring
On 08/25/2020, the IGEM Team Bielefeld gave us a Wiki-Mentoring, in which they taught us the basics of HTML and CSS. The meeting took place via zoom, they created an example wiki step by step, we could ask many questions and in the end we got a handout with the most important expressions. Since the team Bielefeld has been around for many years, they have a lot of experience on how to create a wiki. So the workshop was very helpful for us!
Thank you Bielefeld!
Software development with Darmstadt
As we were both interested in modeling the early formations of a biofilm we got in contact with the iGEM Team TU Darmstadt. We combined our knowledge to create a software tool, which allows us to simulate biofilm growth with different bacteria types. As we had already implemented the numerical model, the Darmstadt Team help us verifiying the results by adding new plots and reviewing the biological part of the simulation. In discussion with the team, we added new features to the code to make it more accessible. Furthermore, the Team gave us access to one of the team members private server with great computational power. This reduced the simulation time and enabled us to fine-tune the models paramters with reasonable waiting time.
