Team:Aix-Marseille/Collaborations
Access to collaborations was a main pillar for our team's work. Exchanging experiences with other teams on design, programming and technical levels helped us grow and gain new insights.
Our team hosted the third edition of the Mediterranean meet up in Marseille. It took place on the 5th and 6th of September at the CNRS campus. We sent out invitations to all of the Mediterranean teams.
Sadly, most were not available, only the AFCM-Egypt team made it.
We welcomed our guests with a delicious French breakfast and famous croissants. After getting to know each other, each team made a snap presentation of their project and got a critical evaluation. It was a chance to make a concise synthesis of our project.
The meetup begins: welcome drink, registration and talks
We organized the presentations and poster sessions during the morning. Each presentation gave rise to new questions from team members and guests.
The AFCM-Egypt team presented its T-cell framework to fight bladder cancer. Then, our team presented its new TB diagnostics procedure.
One of our guest was professor Goetz PARSIEGLA from the BIP (Bioénergétique et Ingénierie des Protéines) laboratory. He gave us constructive feedback about our projects. We are surely readier than ever for Boston!
The last event of the morning was an intervention by Miss Hana MAHMOUD ABDDELZAHER, the African after-iGEM ambassador. She talked about the after iGEM initiative and the possibilities that iGEM has to offer to iGEMers. What a community! Hats off for spreading the word about synthetic biology all around the world!
After a delicious homemade lunch, we prepared a little surprise for our guests. This year, our Meetup got recognition from the iGEM foundation. They've sent us a crew to film a teaser that will be revealed in Boston at this year's Giant Jamboree. Directed by Laetitia OHONA and filmed by Yann TRIBOLLE, this short video serves as an overview of the future of the iGEM competition..
Goetz PARSIEGLA
Hana MAHMOUD ABDELZAHER
Laetitia OHNONA and Yann TRIBOLLE
The meetup goes on: feedback, marketing and 3D augmented reality
Marie GROS-ROSANVALLON
Marie GROS-ROSANVALLON from Pandaroo was invited to the meetup to market a new mobile application she's creating. It's called "Street science". Through the application, you could visit Marseille while scanning little plankton pictures in 3D augmented reality representation of the species. Furthermore, Marie gave us technical feedback on our presentations and posters to get us ready for the big day.
Lisa RICHARD, from the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) was also invited to market her brand: a website where you can find more than 10 000 videos about Science - that includes protocols, experiments and courses.
Lisa RICHARD
We saved the best for last: visiting big bad Marseille
Last but not least, we gave our guests a guided tour of Marseille. We took in some sunshine and enjoyed the beautiful weather.
The meetup was a great technical training opportunity for presenting at the big day and a great occasion where we met awesome people. A big thank you for all the attendees for joining us in Marseille.
We are really looking forward to seeing you all again at the Giant Jamboree.
The US_AFRL_Carrol_HS was putting together a comprehensive guide that combines all wiki knowledge from teams past and present, source code to use on the wiki, and a YouTube walkthrough video for anything wiki related. We helped the team put together the guide through providing data about mediawiki and HTML syntax. Click here to find out more about the guide.
For the third year in a row, we took part in the postcard exchange program organized by team Düsseldorf with the 54 other teams from all over the world. These postcards were all about promoting synthetic biology to the public. Each team had to come up with a postcard design and send 60 copies to the organizing team so they can equally distribute them.
After sending our postcards, we finally received the other postcards from the other teams. It was a fun way to get to know what other teams are working on and to see the creativity of each one of them through the postcards design. Some of them were so funny and beautiful that some team members chose to keep them for themselves.
Representing our home cities, describing our projects and coming up with creative designs: an all-in-all interesting experience and iGEM aspect. Looking forward to meeting all the teams in Boston.
Team Thessaly also worked on developing a TB diagnosis procedure using a different approach. The team needed help to test their primers' efficiency in different conditions. The team sent us two sets of primers to amplify the IS6100 gene (305 bp). We used their PCR protocol with an annealing temperature of 67°C (Tm-5°C) and DMSO to get good results. The results in figure 1 confirm that the given primers are efficient. Figure 1 shows the electrophoresis results of the different PCR products on genomic DNA. The only positive result is when we the genomic DNA is from M. tuberculosis. This shows the specificity of their primers for the given DNA.
Figure 1: primers on different genomic DNA