Team:NYU Abu Dhabi/Collaborations

Volatect

Collaborations

At the beginning of the year, we decided to start seeking collaboration opportunities by contacting teams from our home countries. When possible, we held video call meetings with them to introduce ourselves and our projects, exchange ideas, and offer suggestions.

Cairo University

We contacted the CU team in July and set up a video meeting. We were happy to offer them guidance and mentorship with the modelling aspect of their project which revolved around using yeast cells for desalinating water. Moreover, they provided us with the contact information of a parasitology and infectious diseases professor, and, in return, we connected them to the director of the NYUAD Water Research Center.

Armed Forces College of Medicine

The meeting with AFCM was attended by the iGEM African Ambassador, Hana Abdelzaher. We were incredibly excited to meet her and discuss the educational workshops the AFCM team would be hosting over the summer. We also found we shared a common ground working with CRISPR. We exchanged feedback on our methods and invited them to take part in our Science Sketches, which they did by sending us a script.

KUAS Korea

Our team contacted the KUAS Korea team in July. They provided us with feedback on plans for an application we were planning on developing. We also agreed for our team members to visit them in Korea later in August.

SUS Tech

Our team reached out to the SUS Tech team from China in the spring, and we called them on Skype to talk about our brainstorming processes during that early part of our project.

We were also in contact with

NCTU Formosa

New York University Shanghai

New York University NY.

We participated in IIT Madras’s major collaboration project to translate scripts and videos to 5 different languages - Arabic, French, Spanish, Korean, and Portugese. The videos are meant to introduce the public to biological concepts in a beginner-friendly way, and the translations render this information more accessible to non-English speakers. After providing us with scripts for three videos - Proteins, Introduction to Synthetic Biology, Replication & Transcription - we translated, recorded, and filmed them to create five videos for IIT Madras to publish on their YouTube channel which you can check out here!

Our Science Sketch video series, carried on from the previous year, is an initiative meant to introduce the public to concepts of synthetic biology in an easy-to-understand format. Published on our Facebook page and YouTube channel, these short fun videos revolve around topics from ‘What is iGEM?’ to ‘What is an Application Programming Interface (API)?’. Our 3-video series aims to explain the mechanisms behind the three different aspects of Volatect - collect (microfluidics), detect (CRISPR), and protect (API). We have published the API introductory video as the first in the series and plan to publish the next two over the course of October. We also reached out to other teams personally and through the iGEM major collaborations page, sharing a manual for creating sketches and inviting them to send us their videos or scripts for us to share. We have received and published two sketches, from KUAS Korea and Hong Kong CTU, and two scripts, from AFCM and VIT which we plan to film and publish in the future.

The new manual, available here, is a guide to creating your own sketch, either on traditional paper or digital animation, on any educational topic you believe is important to share.

NYUAD Science Sketch - Application Programming Interface

HK GTC Science Sketch - PETase

KUAS Korea Science Sketch - Fungal Bioluminescence Systems

Ray from our team attended the Taiwan iGEM Conference hosted at the Chung Hsing University. This event was attended by numerous teams from around Taiwan including CCU, NCKU, NCTU, NTHU, CSMU, NCHU, and Mingdao High School. Each team gave a presentation on their project and the research and progress they have done over the summer. Lectures were also given by professors from the university’s biology and life science faculty. It was a great way for us to see how iGEM can bring people together as a community to share their enthusiasm and their contributions to the field of synthetic biology.

After talking virtually in July, Yeji and Yujeong visited the KUAS Korea team in August. We exchanged updates on each of our projects and participated in their discussion on the definitions and prospects of synthetic biology. The KUAS team was particularly curious about how views on synthetic biology differ across regions of the world, and Yeji and Yujeong were more than happy to share their observations, working with a team as diverse as ours.

Members from the VIT team visited our campus and we gave them a tour of our labs and We gave members of VIT a tour of the NYUAD campus and held a brainstorming session with them about their approach to experimental design, helping them to troubleshoot various parts of their project and understand the iGEM competition. They also participated in our logo design discussion.