Team:IISER-Tirupati India/Collaborations

Collaborations


Collaborations are a great way to provide and receive inputs, critique, resources and manpower. We love the idea of open collaborations and open science as it helped us with almost all parts of our project. This year, though being difficult, we received help with experimentation, partnership, project review, biosafety, wiki, project design, modeling and social media promotion of our project. This helped us realise our project to a great extent. We especially appreciate the efforts being put by JOGL to foster open collaborations and we absolutely love this idea. Here we list our collaborations for the season 2020.

Global Meetups

Hosting the All India iGEM Meetup (AIIM)

We hosted the All India iGEM Meetup 2020 in collaboration with IISER Bhopal, IISER Berhampur, BITS Goa, IIT Roorkee and MIT Manipal, which was sponsored by Promega. This event was conducted from 31st July to 1st August 2020. Fifteen potential teams from India apart from the hosting teams registered for this competition (Not all of these teams have participated in iGEM 2020). The event had a series of talks by scientists from multiple fields, project presentations by participating teams, ‘Fireside chat’ sessions with iGEM alumnis and a lot more. The biosafety aspect of our project got a thorough review and assessment from the judges who were invited from different leading institutions across India. We later went on to answer those questions in our project, incorporated the suggestions and modulated the project idea accordingly. Apart from that, the team had a lot of fun collaborating and coordinating with five other competing iGEM teams who helped successfully conduct this massive event with such great success.

For more information please visit : https://2020.igem.org/Calendar/Events#All_India

To checkout our pitch please visit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPFvwRC6UoA

Attending the iGEMeetParis

This was an worldwide virtual meetup organised by Parisian teams, namely, iGEM IONIS Paris, iGEM Sorbonne, iGEM Paris Saclay, iGEM Evry, and iGEM Paris Bettencourt on 5th and 6th September, 2020. At the meetup, we got a chance to show up our pitching skills, where we presented our project idea in under three minutes to the large audience. On the basis of votes from participating audience we grabbed the first prize for best pitch on the same day. It was a fabulous experience getting to know people from other side of the world. Moreover, we also introduced ourselves in a world tour video by hosting team iGEM Paris Saclay in our native language Telugu.

Attending the German iGEM Online Meetup

The German iGEM Meetup was hosted by Team Marburg Giessen from July 4 to July 5 2020, which unfortunately did not participate in iGEM 2020. It was an exceptional experience for us. The meetup was hosted online giving us a all a chance to be a part of the event equally. In the meetup, we introduced our team making s short introduction video. We also gave a virtual poster presentation on our project idea. The whole process was greatly enjoyed by the whole team, especially during the making of the poster and the video. Additionally, we got to meet several people from across the globe and made a few new friends during the game night and open chat sessions.

For more information please visit : https://igemmarburg.com/meetup

Virtual Team Meetups

IISER Tirupati Meets MRIIRS Faridabad

We conducted two virtual meetups with Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies (MRIIRS), Faridabad where we discussed each other’s projects while receiving and giving feedbacks on each other’s projects. We provided inputs in certain aspects of their mathematical modeling of ‘Li-Koff’ and helped them get ideas for conducting outreaches and human practices. Together we planned to conduct an outreach, reaching out to the Indian high school students, spread awareness against overuse of antibiotics in farms leading to antibiotic pollution, introduce them to the concept of synthetic biology and iGEM. Overall, we were fortunate enough to have collaborated with MRIIRS Faridabad which has a great project and some fantastic people.

IIT Meets IISER-iGEM IIT Roorkee

Our meet with Team iGEM IIT Roorkee involved discussion of the project ideas, genetic circuits and bioinformatic modeling. Their project involves an alternate to the phage therapy using the Pyocin protein. They gave us an idea of their project modeling while we talked about conducting outreaches, surveys and approaching sponsors. It was a nice experience overall and was very informative.

Florida meets Tirupati-iGEM FSU

Team FSU was like a sister project to us that was also working on antimicrobial resistance from a marine life perspective (Dolphins!!). We had two virtual meetups throughout the iGEM season and both the meetups involved discussion on the general progress of the project, inputs and suggestions on different modules of each other’s projects. It was a fun experience and we made new friends!

Postcards

Postcards from India to Germany:
iGEM Dusseldorf

Introducing local art form to the iGEM community is always a fun thing to do, and a fantastic way to do this is with a postcard collaboration with iGEM Dusseldorf Germany. In this, each participating team designed a postcard reflecting or promoting synthetic biology in some way. We designed our postcard using the Warli art form which is one of the oldest forms of Indian folk art that originated in the Warli region of Maharashtra. After successfully making the postcard we shipped it to Team Dusseldorf Germany.