Team:Bilkent-UNAMBG/Collaborations
Collaboration
Umay's Adventures in Synthetic Biology
Our team members Merve Nida Baştürk and İlayda Şenyüz wrote a story book for children, titled as “THE ADVENTURES OF UMAY IN SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY”. This book aims to introduce synthetic biology to the children in an intriguing way. The main character of the book Umay is a little girl whose grandfather has diabetes mellitus. Throughout the story, Umay tries to find an alternative, easy-to-use therapeutics for his grandfather via synthetic biology as we did. Integrating our project to a children’s story also helped us to extend the range of the people that we explain our project. As a collaboration with other iGEM teams, we started up a collaboration for the translation of our story book “The Adventures of Umay in Synthetic Biology” into other languages. We sent an English version of our story to the teams contacted us. The teams that translated our story into their languages are listed below.
India IISc Bangalore - Bengali
Taiwan CCU - Taiwanese Mandarin
IIT Madras Language Project 2.0
We collaborated with IIT Madras iGEM team’s ‘Language Project 2.0’. Their project includes filming videos explaining the basic concepts of biotechnology. Over the course of a year they uploaded 85 videos, covering 15 Indian languages and 28 foreign languages. We took part in their project by translating their ‘Introduction to Synthetic Biology’ script into Turkish and voiced-over a powerpoint presentation they sent us. You can watch the Turkish version of the ‘Language Project 2.0’ by clicking here.
Washington
Washington iGEM Team contacted us to collaborate on the translation of the outreach booklet. Their booklet consists of different activities which could be performed with students from different grades to present them a fun and at the same time informative way of enjoying synthetic biology. We translated some of their activities into Turkish and visited 4th grade students to introduce the concept of synthetic biology and distributed the booklet to them.
iGEM Copenhagen
We filled out iGEM Copenhagen Team’s survey about their project Ovulaid, and shared it with the people around us to support Copenhagen as much as we can. Ovulaid offers a better and easier alternative to the existing fertility tracking methods. We’re glad to have helped them with this wonderful project.
Collaboration with the ULaVerne_Collab Team
The ULaVerne iGEM Team reached out to us for a collaboration, and since we both work on Diabetes mellitus we thought that it would be great to exchange ideas, articles, protocols etc. with them. Despite having different approaches to the problem, we have the same motives behind our projects. We arranged a Skype meeting with Karen and Rosette from their team, and had a wonderful time talking with them. We talked about our inspirations, ideas, experiments and our processes in general, including human practices and collaborations. We also exchanged plenty of articles that might be useful for our projects. It was truly a fun and fruitful collaboration for us!