Team:Ionis Paris/Collaborations
Bactails - IGEM IONIS
During the month of July, we collaborated with the team from Grenoble in the
context of a collaboration with all the other French teams and a Swiss team
(total 11 teams).
The aims were to promote France among the iGEM competition by creating a
video gathering all French teams and communicate on synthetic biology to
society.
The participating teams had to send a video presenting their team and describing their project to create a big video. The idea was to shoot the video in front of stylish landscapes like famous monuments. For example, we filmed our part in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris.
In each collaborating team, one or two members managed assembling and editing the final video.
We loved the idea of a 100% French project which would allow us to promote synthetic biology in France, so we accepted the collaboration right away!
Here are the teams who participated with us: IGEM Grenoble 2020, IGEM Nantes, IGEM Evry IGEM Toulouse, iGEM Aix-Marseille Université, IGEM 2020 Sorbonne Université Paris, iGEM Bordeaux, IGEM GO Paris Saclay, IGEM Paris Bettencourt, IGEM Strasbourg and IGEM Lausanne.
During the month of June, we collaborated with the German team from Düsseldorf in the context of the postcard project they launch every year. For this, each team participating in this collaboration designed a postcard (50 copies): on the front, an image related to our project or synthetic biology and on the back, a small informational text.
After this, all the teams had to send them out to the Düsseldorf team. Once they received them all, they sent the other teams’ postcards back to us!
We really liked this collaboration and found it was very creative. It allowed us to get to know some projects in an original and fun way. We were also able to send out these postcards which allowed us to promote synthetic biology to the public.
In June, we collaborated with the Aachen and TU Darmstadt teams from Germany
in the context of their paper plane project. The aim was to connect with
other teams from all over the world by creating a video to spread our
message.
The teams participating had to send a 10 seconds video in which you catch a
paper plane, flick your fingers, appear with a lab coat and then throw the
paper plane to the next team.
We decided to record our video in front of the Palace of Versailles, because
it is a very important monument in the History of France.
Overall, the iJET plane flew over 4 continents and reached more than 25
different countries!
We found this project fun to do and, somehow, it was a way to connect us to some iGEM Teams from the entire World! Here is the final video:
In August, the iGEM IISER Berhampur team launched the iMASK project.
It aimed at spreading awareness on wearing masks during the Covid-19
pandemic.
For this, participating teams had to design a mask inspired by their
favorite TV show or movie.
As one of our team members is a big fan of the series “Friends” and re-watched all the episodes during quarantine, we decided it was a great idea for her to design a mask inspired by this series!
The idea was to film us painting the mask, take a picture of a team member wearing it, post it on our social media and tag the IISER Berhampur team.
We found this collaboration very original and up to date with the current pandemic situation.
On the weekend of the 4th and 5th of July, the German team from Marburg
organized an International virtual meetup gathering iGEM teams from all over
the world.
Their meetup was called “20 years have passed - 20 years to come” and the
aim was to celebrate 20 years of synthetic biology.
This weekend was full of interesting talks, workshops and games on synthetic
biology.
Our team participated in this meetup by shooting a one-minute team
presentation video and presenting our poster to our fellow iGEM teams on
Sunday.
It was a great opportunity for us to practice on virtually presenting a poster to other iGEM teams and to enable them to discover our project BacTail. We were glad to participate in this amazing meetup and we would like to thank the iGEM Marburg team for this opportunity and impressive weekend.
On the 5th and 6th of September, we had the opportunity to organize the iGEMeetParis Worldwide Virtual Meetup hosted by all five Parisian teams (Ionis Paris, Sorbonne, Paris Saclay, Evry and Bettencourt). Our team’s initial idea was to organize a European Meetup in Paris (like some teams had hosted last year).
However, with the pandemic, we were unable to physically welcome all teams
in Paris and had to plan it virtually. In June, we contacted the other
Parisian teams and suggested them to co-organize this event with us. All the
teams were super excited to join us on this project!
We wanted this meetup to be perfect so planning it was difficult and it took
time to organize especially because we could not meet in person, but we had
several zoom calls instead.
Throughout the months of planning, we learnt a lot and quickly realized that
a lot of things had to be thought through: making a schedule, communicating
on the event, finding speakers, finding workshops and of course, the
logistics of doing it online!
It was our first time organizing such a huge event from beginning to end,
but we are proud of how the event turned out!
Big thanks to Sorbonne, Paris Saclay, Evry and Bettencourt teams for their help in this project. It allowed us to virtually meet teams from all over the world, and maybe one day we will be able to meet in person…
Below are the flyers containing the schedule for the meetup: thank you to the iGEM VRT Committee for helping us with the logistics, iGEM teams who pitched their project (Teams HKUST, FCB-UANL, IISER Tirupati, Alma, UIUC-Illinois, NCKU Tainan, IISER Berhampur, NOVA_LxPortugal, IISER Pune, Moscow-Russia, St Andrews), iGEM teams who hosted workshops (St Andrews and RUM), speakers (Paul Lubrano, Agathe Lermant, Patrick Torbey, Guillaum Levrier, Pierre Crozet and Maher Ben Khaled) and After iGEM Ambassadors (Nana Oye for hosting the Bio-Entrepreneurship Hackathon).