Team:Chalmers-Gothenburg/Collaborations

Collaborations

During our iGEM year we have had the chance to meet and work together with other iGEM teams. We have provided assistance to one another, and shown that greater things can be accomplished by working together.

Providing Feedback on Wiki Tutorial

Creating your own wiki is an advanced task, especially if your experience in this area is limited. When we started working on our own wiki in June we therefore decided to collaborate with the US AFRL CarrollHS iGEM team after they reached out to us. They had an ongoing project with the goal of creating a tutorial on how to make a nice iGEM wiki, which they deemed would be a useful resource for struggling iGEM teams. This tutorial included both a written document as well as a series of video tutorials, which the members responsible for the wiki in our team went through and provided feedback on. We in iGEM team Chalmers-Gothenburg are delighted to be a part of the development of this tutorial, as we think it is a great initiative and hope that in the future it will be useful to teams around the world.

iGEM4ENVIRONMENT

During the iGEM competition, we are all using a lot of disposable plastics in the lab. It is difficult to reduce the amount of plastic that is used, due to the need to avoid contamination. In addition, many iGEM teams are also traveling to the Giant Jamboree by plane, which has an immensely negative impact on the global climate. For these reasons, our team decided to do something good for the environment and agreed that each team member would pick up at least five pieces of trash every day to compensate for our negative environmental impact. This seemingly small action has resulted in our team having removed over 4500 pieces of trash from the environment since July 1st. However, we didn’t feel content stopping there.

As iGEM is all about helping each other, we decided to reach out to other teams to help us with cleaning up the earth, and to create a video promoting this initiative. The idea behind this is to show other teams that together we have the power to do something meaningful for our environment. We invited iGEM Queens Canada, iGEM Acibadem Istanbul and iGEM Copenhagen to contribute with material for the video. They went out, just like us, to clean their streets and oceans. We compensated in this small way, by making sure that the waste outside of the lab is where it should be, and also showed that together we can help each other and our environment in a significant way! #iGEM4ENVIRONMENT

Helping Other Teams

We assisted iGEM team Moscow and iGEM team Copenhagen by filling out their surveys. On instagram we participated in iGEM Stony Brooks' instagram challenge, in addition to taking part in the iGEMxSDGs challenge started by the collaboration between iGEM Tübingen, iGEM TAS_Taipei and iGEM Costa Rica. More details about this can be found on the Education and Engagement page.

Participating in DTU Biobuilders' BioBrick Tutorial

In April most of our team visited Denmark for the BioBrick Tutorial that the DTU Biobuilders, the iGEM team from the Technical University of Denmark, organized. They invited us and other iGEM teams from Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark to participate in this three day event during which we learned about BioBricks, both in theory and in the lab. It was also a very fun opportunity to get more closely knit as a group as well as meeting and getting to know other nordic iGEM teams. The BioBrick tutorial made us extra excited about the Giant Jamboree and meeting even more iGEM:ers!

Further Reading

Check out the other ways in which we interacted with the community around us! In Education & Engagement we have collected all the ways in which we aimed to inspire and educate people, whereas Integrated Human Practices focuses on the talks we had with experts and professionals within related fields. If you are curious about the people behind the DePCB project, head over to our Team page!