Team:Manchester/Collaborations
COLLABORATION
“None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things with great love, and together we can do something wonderful” - Mother Teresa. The iGEM competition is not just a competition pitting young scientists together to see who can ‘out-science’ the other, rather it is an international effort to improve society using Synthetic Biology. Collaboration is rightly an integral part of iGEM, as each team individually can make something great, but together we can make something truly spectacular. This is our collaborations page, which demonstrates how we have worked with other teams further ours as well as theirs projects.
How we honoured the spirit of iGEM…
In 7 collaborations:
1.
Newcastle Meet up- we had been kindly invited to the UK iGEM meet-up, where we had the opportunity to interact with many different teams.
2.
Edinburgh OG team- at the 2019 UK iGEM meet-up, we found that the OG Edinburgh team were also interested in the pollutant impact of dyes. We decided to team-up: we helped them with their public outreach, and they helped us with our research into dyes.
3.
Sheffields University- we shared coloured sample to validate the functionality of their developed plate reader.
4.
Exeter PET EXE – a member of our modelling team spent time over a code to aid in the modelling of their enzyme, which digests plastics.
5.
Nottingham NoTox - we shared industry specific contacts with Nottingham, facilitating the demonstrating of their work.
6.
US AFRL Carroll HS Wiki Guide – Our wiki experts completed specialist areas, which were added to Caroll’s wiki guide
7.
TAS Taipei, Uni of Costa Rica, and Tuebingen Collaborations - we took part in their iGEMxSDGs challenge.
Collaborations – beyond MIB
As part of iGEM, and the broader scientific community, collaboration is valuable: allowing communication between researchers to accelerate progress and enhance the quality of the work. We took part in the UK meetup held in Newcastle where we presented our project to diverse UK teams. We also took part in the social held in Sheffield. In both events, we communicated with other teams, developed relations, and sought for collab! Moreover, social media platforms, specifically Instagram and Twitter, connected us to world-wide iGEM teams. Below is a list of our effective collaborations:
Act I:Newcastle University
Our collaborations was greatly helped by the generous invitation to the 2019 UK iGEM meet-up, extended by Newcastle iGEM. At this meet-up we were able to interact and discuss our project with many different teams across the UK. We were amazed to see all the different project happening across the UK, which not only motivated us to execute our project, but also inspired us to really think big with our project. From this meet-up we also initiated other collaborations, where we were fortunate enough to receive help from other teams, and learnt they could use our help too (see below).
We would like to thank Newcastle University and Newcastle iGEM team 2019 for arranging such a wonderful meet-up!
Act II: Edinburgh - Remedye:
At the UK Newcastle iGEM meetup, we met the Edinburgh Over-grad Team and learnt that both our projects revolved around dyes. Their project was focused on breaking down toxic dyes used in textile industry. Although they had talked to experts in the field, they had not done any public outreach. So we offered to include some of their questions relating to dye pollution and sustainable textile manufacturing in our online questionnaire, circulate it and share the outcomes. This would provide them with vital data on public opinions surrounding dye pollution which they could then integrate into their project. In return, as we had done minimal research into the impact of dye pollution to the environment and general health, the Edinburgh team offered to share their research with us. Therefore, through this collaboration, we developed a broader more accessible questionnaire which allowed the retrieval and analysis of more data useful for both the teams. (link to project description)
Act III: Sheffield – OPEN LUX:
OPEN LUX is Sheffield’s affordable plate reader project. This is designed to be a modular, open source way to benefit from a plate reader and the specific features you need. To help them compare their plate reader with current plate readers in the market, we gave them various samples of our colour-expressing proteins as well as our data obtained using a CLARIOstar® ( BMG Labtech) plate reader to allow comparison of results. This would allow them to demonstrate the functionality of their product in comparison to current industry leaders which could give huge credence to their system. Additionally, this data would allow us to further characterise our chromoproteins. Unfortunately, we were told by the Sheffield team that they were unable to provide us with data for our samples.
Act IV: Exeter – PET EXE:
At the Newcastle UK Meetup, we saw the Exeter team present their project about clearing out microplastics from washing machine flow through. After discussions with them, we learnt that they were trying to model PETase enzyme activity in order to calculate the amount of enzyme needed per wash. We found the Exeter work very interesting and so we wanted to become more involved with them, we therefore decided to help their team with some modelling. Following the UK meet up, we helped the Exeter team by producing a spreadsheet able to automate the calculation of required enzyme concentration for digestion of microplastics over the course of a defined set of washes. This piece spreadsheet is not exclusive to PETase and can easily be adapted to other enzymes with known kinetics. This model is based on the assumption of constant digestion over time. This then allows the calculation of how much enzyme is required for that set time-course to fully digest (assuming digestion is continuous) a material, in this case, for the Exeter team, microplastics. A limitation that we believe Exeter may encounter is that the model assumes the microplastics are fully digestible by PET at a constant rate with a constant enzyme activity.
All this helped Exeter to easily model how much of their improved enzyme is required per wash, informing their design on their PET collection tank.
Act V: Nottingham - NoTox:
At the Newcastle iGEM meet up, we also met with the Nottingham team who were looking at developing new ways to test for Clostridium botulinum toxin in the food industry. Their project exploits using the surrogate strain C. sporogenes, an alternative non-toxic strain to C. botulinum that produces the easily-detectable compound, acetone, as a marker for toxin production. This allows them to develop a safe test for monitoring botulinum toxin production in foods. They require a syringe-based system for the sampling of acetone levels; however, they lacked contact with specialists in the area. We provided them leading industry contacts, including the mechanical engineer Nigel Harrison, who significantly helped in their work demonstration which formed a significant part of their human practices. Additionally, we also suggested Doug Jennings as a significant contact which could aid their project.
Act VI: US AFRL Carroll HS - Wiki Guide:
Carroll HS has been working on a wiki guide to help teach future iGEM teams coding for wiki and website writing in general. Our team is proud to have members that are skilled in both website design and functional coding. As a result, we wrote a significant amount of specialist material to add to their wiki guide. If implemented, this should result in wikis being easier to understand from the source code. This in turn will better allow future teams to learn from this material and better adapt and reuse the codes. Teams who are inexperienced in coding might struggle with website design, but with this guide they could more easily improve and innovate from previous work allowing for better and more creative wikis.
Act VII: TAS Taipei, Costa Rica, Tuebingen - iGEMxSDGs challenge:
Teams TAS Taipei, Costa Rica and Tuebingen challenged other iGEMers to take part in the Sustainable Development Goals SDG challenge. The challenge requires teams to pick 4 SDGs from 17 adopted by world leaders in 2015, and develop their project to tackle these issues whilst also challenging other iGEM teams to participate. This challenge made us think further on the impact of our hair-care alternative. After being challenged by the UCL team, we chose the following goals...
3 - Good health and well-being: Our project’s aim is to create an alternative hair dye which avoids damage to hair and does not contain compounds responsible for allergic reactions.
6 - Clean water and Sanitation: Our hair-dye product does not contain toxic compounds, lowering the risk of contaminating water in case of improper disposal.
9 - Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure: Cutiful is one of a kind, lacking strong precedent in industry, though we hope to pave the way for the development of bacterial dyes on a large scale.
12 - Responsible consumption and production: Production of these compounds using bacteria reduces the use of chemicals and overall pollution.
These goals allowed us to think more about the impact of Cutiful on the world. To further spread the message we challenged the Madrid, Exeter and Oxford teams to take part