Collaborations

iGEM2020 definitely differs from other iGEM seasons.

This year we had lots of online collaboration opportunities that were focused on creating something to let people know about synthetic biology and ways it can contribute to making our world a better place.

Also, we hosted a series of meetings with iGEMers to discuss our projects and get to know each other.

Nevertheless, during the whole iGEM2020 season we were thinking about ways we can make our testing system better and easier to use. So, we came up with the collaboration idea for other iGEMers who work with single-nucleotide polymorphism detection.

As we use qPCR detection we wanted to find other ways for SNP detection which would be portable and possible to be used outside of the laboratory.

SUNY ONEONTA team

Team SUNY ONEONTA engineers a field-testing system that can quickly and easily provide a dairy farmer with cow’s genotype which is important for production of the A1 milk type.

Guys use a Flappase-based system and intend a Crispr/Cas9 based system for SNP detection and their system is going to be portable and affordable for users. So, we discussed how our teams can help each other to achieve our main goal – to make our world a better place with synthetic biology tools. We delve into our projects' technical details and collaboration opportunities.

We decided to make our collaboration at least for 2 years since our teams need more time to accomplish our goals. We’re working together on:

A lecture about isothermal PCR primer design
A lecture about the influence of A2 and A1 milk on human’s body
An article about physiological influence of A2 milk on humans and methods we can use to improve the situation
Design of a portable genotyping system for autosomal recessive diseases screening

UC Davis team

Team UC Davis works with bioinformatics tools. They are experienced in primers design and kindly agreed to arrange several lectures on bioinformatics for us.

We also collaborated by preparing and presenting a mini lecture for college students about Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)

We shared our ideas in terms of the iGEM 2020 season and explained the basis of the method.

iGEM Moscow Team

We believe it is amazing that this year 2 teams from Russia take part in iGEM!

On the first meeting with the iGEM Moscow team we shared our ideas and found some ways to collaborate

The main idea we’ve come up with was to create a portable single-nucleotide polymorphism detection system based on crispr/Cas9 endonuclease and to apply it in Genomus.

During the following meetings we discussed crispr/Cas9 based genotyping tools in depth and tried to arrange with these guys about working together on developing such a system.
On the following meetings we discussed our idea to work together on developing a testing system based on crispr/Cas9 endonuclease they use in their iGEM2020 project.

Even though we didn’t make anything in terms of our projects, we decided to popularize iGEM through writing articles about our teams & projects for Pirogov Medical University's and Moscow State University's newspapers & websites.
We also arranged an offline meeting with the Moscow team where we discussed our projects and shared ideas

TU Delft team

Speaking of online events, we took part in TU Delft video collaboration where our team member Veronika shared shortly the main goal of our iGEM 2020 project.

GO Paris Saclay, IONIS, Thessaly iGEM teams

Later on, Parisian teams arranged the Global Parisian Meetup where our team members took part in a project pitch competition.

We were asked different questions and therefore understood better on which aspects of the project we should focus first.

iGEM Grenoble Alpes

Grenoble Alpes team’s project focuses on biofilms patients with cystic fibrosis have in their lungs. We decided to organize a couple of meetings to discuss our projects since our team also works with cystic fibrosis but in terms of genetics. It was really nice to get to know their ideas and to share ours!

iGEM Patras team

Our team translated iGEM Patras project promotion video into Russian.

Team:Moscow-Russia/Collaborations