Collaborations

Collaboration MeetUp in Erlangen

Cooperating with other teams is one of the fundamentals of iGEM. To promote collaborations and exchange in general already at the beginning of the iGEM year we organized our so called Collaboration Meetup from 17th to 19th May 2019 .

On Friday the teams from Marburg, Strasbourg, Tübingen and BOKU-Vienna Vienna arrived and we welcomed them with a pub quiz which included different categories like facts about Erlangen and general biological topics. Afterwards we split the teams up to get to know each other better in the following pub crawl.

Saturday started with a breakfast and three interesting talks about immunology, epigenetics and bi-functional antibodies. After lunch our team had organized some great workshops about brewing typical Bavarian beer, Deep Learning techniques and Lab fun to prove how skilled iGEM participants really are in the lab. Additionally we offered an HTML, CSS and Wiki Freeze workshops with which we wanted to support other teams by building their own website. It was really useful for everybody who participated and we got a lot of positive feedback. Furthermore we stayed in contact with the teams and helped them with questions concerning occurring wiki problems. To get to know the other projects better and to get new impulses we were having a poster session. Since the meetup was at the beginning of our projects we were able to give each other a lot of valuable input.

For Sunday morning we had prepared a collaboration speed dating. There were always two teams explaining their project shortly to each other and thereafter they had a certain amount of time to talk about possible collaborations. Afterwards every team rotated one spot further until all teams talked to another. All in all, it was quite successful, because the teams were more focused on how to help each other than in normal poster sessions.

Day of Immunology, freshman greeting and Long Night of Sciences

During our collaboration speed dating the idea came up to spread the basic principle of others iGEM projects at our human practice events to show the diversity of synthetic biology. That is why we explained the projects of the teams Marburg, Strasbourg, Tübingen and BOKU-Vienna Vienna to interested passerby and other scientists at the Day of immunology and the Long Night of Science Human Practice and to young students at the freshman greeting.

iGEM Kaiserslautern and Crowdfunding

Due to the huge success the iGEM team Kaiserslautern achieved with their Crowdfunding campaign we asked them for help for our own. Team Kaiserslautern suggested a Skype interview in which they explained us how to start a successful crowdfunding campaign. Our conversation raised the idea that Kaiserslautern could write a guide about ìHow to do Crowdfundingî to help future teams. You find their guide and more information about their project here Kaiserslautern crowdfunding guide. So far our campaign is going pretty well: we already archived our first funding goal of 1000Ä within in the first three days of our campaign.

iGEM Marburg - Golden Gate webinar

Team Marburg was so kind to hold a Golden Gate webinar explaining the principle and its advantages compared to other cloning methods. In the end we got the chance to create our own Golden Gate constructs. We would like to thank team Marburg for organizing it and even though we did not use the Golden Gate system for this year¥s iGEM project we all learned a lot for future projects and are looking forward to trying this useful cloning method.

iGEM Düsseldorf and Postcards

Since 2016 iGEM Düsseldorf is organizing a postcard campaign with the purpose to bring synthetic biology closer to the public. We were happy to join their this yearís campaign Düsseldorf postcard collab by designing our own postcard explaining our topic. It is great to see how many teams joined this campaign: we got 48 postcards from teams worldwide! We were overwhelmed to see how well and creative all these teams explained their projects!

Vienna - sixpics challenge

We attended the sixpics challenge of BOKU-Vienna Vienna for which we needed to design a comic about our project in six pictures. BOKU-Vienna collected the comics from all participating iGEM teams and printed these in a comic book with a little explaining text. The comics shall support the communication to the public, as even children can understand the messages.

Participating at the Spring festival and the Alpen MeetUp

Next to our own MeetUp we also participated at the Spring festival in Bonn (Germany) and the Alpen MeetUp in Munich (Germany) to get to know other teams and projects. In Bonn we met teams from all around Europe, listened to interesting talks e.g. about optogenetic and aptamers and took part in great workshops like the MEMEology workshops organized by iGEM Stockholm.

Additionally we visited the Alpen MeetUp in Munich where we held poster sessions in a small round of teams, took part in a workshop about antibodies which was really informative for our project and presented our projects to the other teams.

Tübingen, Costa_Rica and TAS_Taipei - #igemxsdgs

With the #igemxsdgs, the iGEM teams of Tübingen, Costa_Rica and TAS_Taipei started a challenge for iGEM teams, in which they explain which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) they support. The purpose was to raise the awareness of the SDGs of the United Nations (UN), which aim to improve the worldís situation by promoting prosperity, equality, peace and care for the environment.

Team:FAU Erlangen/Collaborations