Team:UCL/Collaborations
Overview
King’s College London (KCL)
Considering recent events in 2020 highlighting racial inequality, us and King’s College London were thinking to address equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) within iGEM. Both our teams recognised that iGEM could be doing more to make EDI efforts more encouraged and accountable, as teams working to improve EDI within iGEM were only doing it of their own volition. This led us to brainstorm ideas, resulting in the decision to design a survey to identify areas within iGEM that were most critical to address. Recent events in the USA further emphasised the need to address the issues. To this end, we met up virtually multiple times to troubleshoot each other’s ideas for our respective surveys. Some of the topics we covered include GDPR considerations, designing surveys for global audiences, data analysis and more. From this collaboration, King’s College London were able to release their survey and gain valuable insight into how to improve EDI within iGEM.
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
As we are undertaking the new two-year project format introduced this year, in July we initiated contact with experts in microbial desalination cell technology from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), who have agreed to collaborate with UCL’s iGEM 2021 team. They offered to help next year’s team to test our three-species bacterial co-culture, as well as helping them to build a Microbial Desalination Cell prototype. Through multiple video meetings and further correspondence, we were able to extract valuable information about approaches that could maximise the success of our device. The topics we covered include which materials to use for constructing our device, the importance of surface area on our electrodes and which type of Microbial Desalination Cell configuration to use. We hope that these efforts result in our teams forming a fruitful partnership in next year’s competition to greatly improve various aspects of our respective projects.
MSP-Maastricht University
In late July, we were contacted by MSP-Maastricht’s inviting us to participate in their ‘iGEM 2020 Proceedings Journal’. After seeing this as a great opportunity to learn about other teams’ projects and conduct further research into the potential of our device, We replied to inform them that we were keen to participate and were delighted to see how they had built a website portal to facilitate the efforts. Towards the end of August, we submitted our paper titled: “Integrating enzymatic PET degradation into Microbial Desalination Cell technology” for peer review and received back two papers to peer review. Using the framework materials given to us by MSP-Maastricht in early October, we completed the peer review of both papers and returned them to MSP-Maastricht to complete a fruitful collaboration. This allowed us to promote our research in the scientific world to increase the awareness and interest in our proposed solution to plastic pollution and freshwater security.
University of Exeter
There was an opportunity to collaborate on a one-off basis to complete the requirements for this year’s Silver Medal 2: Collaboration. Having already been in constant communication from our partnership, they informed us that they were struggling with some aspects of uploading content to their wiki. To remedy this, our wiki experts held a tutorial on Zoom, which Exeter told us was extremely helpful. We look forward to seeing the results of this after the wiki freeze!
For more information, please visit our Partnership page!
