Team:NAWI Graz/Collaborations
Collaboration with iGEM Munich
iGEM Munich 2018 worked on an optimized cell free system for the high titer production of bacteriophages. A cell free system was initially not in our focus, as our advisor Hannes Beims uses a classical protocol for the production. We found the production to be troublesome and so we looked for other possibilities while improving our work with the classical protocol. We stumbled across the project of Munich 2018, perfectly timed, as we planned to go to the Alpine Meetup anyway - a really nice event, by the way, thanks Munich 2019 for this experience too.
At the meetup we talked to members of the former team, who were in contact with this year's team. Furthermore they arranged that we got the phage buffer which contains many components we did not have. This buffer is absolutely necessary for the production of the phages in their optimized cell free system. In the meantime the classical phage production gave us phages with a high titer and final EIS-measurements were done. The cell free system is now topic of ongoing research with the first steps already taken at the time of the wiki freeze (see more on Design). By the Giant Jamboree we will know more about the usefulness of this approach for future phage productions.
Collaboration with iGEM UNSW
The UNSW-team developed a business plan scaffold in cooperation with the teams of UBC, Aalto Helsinki and KU Leuven. Their intention was to create a clear and complete business scaffold, which is ready to use for people who want to start a business from scratch and have no experience.
We think they achieved their goal.
We participated in their „minor collaboration“ and used the scaffold as a template to develop our own business plan. We sent it back to them, so they could see which parts where the most useful and which ones we did not fully use as they intended it. We are interested in scaffold, as our project began to revolve more and more around the real application of Beeosensor and many questions regarding business, marketing and financing arose. If one wants to take an iGEM-project to the next level, many things regarding these need to be considered, especially if one is a scientist.
We found the scaffold very useful for us, as we did not have much experience with business plans yet.
The scaffold is easy to use, has a logical structure and leaves nothing out, as far as we can see. Additionally, it provides links to useful websites, where more detailed information about the different topics can be found. It has helped a lot to get a better idea about how to start a business and which steps are necessary to do so. We are really grateful for this compacted business knowledge, which can easily be overwhelming.
Thank you guys a lot!
Check out their website to learn more about their work and find other teams beside NAWI Graz with Beeosensor that want to further develop their project.
Collaboration with iGEM Madrid
This collaboration is about hardware development. We designed our own circuit print for the ADuCM355 chip to meet the requirement of a low price which commercial sensors do not fulfill. This is a very versatile chip for performing electrochemical measurements, as it combines different electrochemical input and output stages with a full functional microcontroller. The iGEM Madrid team wanted to try our circuit for their measurements. We measure EIS, they need cyclic voltammetry, but this makes no difference for the hardware design. They only have to change the software a little bit. One of the members of the iGEM Madrid team is currently in Shenzhen, China and therefore has the possibility to produce hardware prints very conveniently for a low price. So we sent them our hardware design with all permissions, they will produce it in China. And we both get some finished prints. This is a win – win situation for both of us. It may even affect their project insofar that they use our hardware instead of their own, if it performs better in the tests.
Collaboration with iGEM IIT Madras
The collaboration with iGEM IIT Madras was a language project. Most YouTube videos about science are in English but not all students can follow the video because they don’t know English that well. To make knowledge available not only to English speaking people but to all people we participated in this project. iGEM IIT Madras provided the Powerpoint presentation and the English text for the video and our team translated it to German and uploaded the same video but with German synchronization on YouTube. Overcoming the language barrier is still a big problem for a lot of students, this is why we wanted to be part of this collaboration.
Thank you iGEM IIT Madras for making science open to public!
You can find more details about the language project on their website
If you want to watch the video in German, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT8yXyOfR6E