Team:UNILausanne/Collaborations
Collaborations
We are happy to say that we had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with several iGEM teams throughout the course of the competition, both national and international.
SwissGEM meetup
We hosted, along with the EPFL team
(https://2020.igem.org/Team:EPFL) and the
UZH team (https://2020.igem.org/Team:UZurich), the
SwissGEM 2020 meetup! We collaborated throughout the summer to set up the meetup, decide on the activities
and organize the whole event.
All three teams gathered in Lausanne for two days where we explored the city, got to know each other, presented
our projects and participated in various team-building exercises. The project presentations and the feedback we
received allowed us to improve our presentation about the different aspects of our iGEM project in both form and content.
It was a perfect opportunity to practice for the final presentation at the Jamboree.
At the end of the two days, the teams parted ways feeling refreshed and with a new outlook on their respective
projects.
Blog with Chalmers-Gothenburg
One of the first and still on-going collaborations has been with the team from Chalmers-Gothenburg, Sweden on our joint blog, The Transcriptome. With this blog, we aim to make science more accessible not only by writing about it for people without a biological background, but by writing literally in their own language. We translated the blog in eight different languages: English, French, Swedish, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Polish. If you want to know more about it, please visit the following link, or visit The Transcriptome blog.
MSP Journal Initiative
This year the team from MSP-Maastricht in the Netherlands created their Journal Initiative , where they asked teams to write one to three short scientific papers that would be featured in their online journal. As it was a great opportunity to gain more experience with writing and reviewing articles, we agreed to participate along with many other iGEM teams. We had the pleasure of writing and submitting an article on our project, as well as peer-reviewing two articles. Click here to see our article in pdf!
Heidelberg Science Slam
Conveying our project to the world is an essential aspect of our project,
especially as B.O.T (Bacterial Oscillation Therapy) would directly affect human lives.
Unsurprisingly, a big part of iGEM is the communication of science to a general audience!
Accomplishing this during a global pandemic was not easy. One way we were able to achieve this was
through a Science Slam, organised by the iGEM team of Heidelberg, Germany. This virtual event consisted
on briefly presenting the projects and was featured live on youtube:
Click here to see the video
Joining the Science Slam gave us the opportunity to expand our outreach and even more importantly,
to learn how to present our project to non-scientists. We had great fun participating - thanks to
iGEM Heidelberg for this chance!
Ohio State iGEM team
As our project would be applied in the human body, we realized that we needed to incorporate a biosecurity measure into our bacteria, to prevent it from colonizing niches outside the human body and to prevent any undesirable side effects inside the human body. With this in mind, we reached out to the Ohio State team (USA). They provided us with some valuable insight into how to design a kill switch as well as how to begin to model it. They also gave us advice on how to start research into our kill switch. The Ohio State team gave an overview of the most commonly used ones (both in current research and past iGEM projects) and pointed us towards past iGEM teams who worked on kill switches not using any of the three repressor proteins we already use in our repressilator. Check out their work this year: Ohio State wiki page
Imperial College London
During the poster sessions of the iGEM German Meetup, a member from the Imperial College iGEM team (London, UK) told us that they were planning to provide help with modelling to other teams as their team had a strong background in maths and physics. It was exactly what we needed, so we agreed to keep in touch. After explaining our project and asking for some help with the model of the repressilator, we organised some online meetings. They also shared some tutorials and some scripts, both with basic concepts about modelling or with more specific questions we had. Overall they showed us how to model differential equations, explained Mass Actions kinetics and the derivation of the Hill function. All that really helped us to introduce into our ODE model the synchronization with IPTG or aTc Learn more about our models! They were always nice and supportive!
Video collaboration
Finally, we also collaborated on a team video with other French iGEM teams, in which almost all the european French-speaking teams took part. You can find our video below, and the full-length video of all the teams here.
