Team:RHIT/collaboration

Collaboration

US AFRL Carroll High School Meetup

Group Photo

In order to collaborate and exchange ideas with other iGEM teams, on June 22th, five of the team members - Ben, Lu, Marry, Nicholas, and Joy - went to Dayton, where an iGEM team meetup was held and four other teams joined (Ohio State University, United States Air Force Academy, Carroll High School and Alma College). At the beginning of the meeting, we introduced ourselves and played some games to get familiar with each other. After interacting with other teams, each team introduced their projects through presentations and shared confusion about the project. In addition to getting suggestions from other teams, we also skyped an expert of iGEM and discussed the expectation of the competition in the meeting.

This collaboration was very valuable as we were able to present on our project and get feedback and extra inspiration from the other teams. From these suggestions, we had a better idea of the scope of options available to us and were able to choose a more clear path for our project. The meetup also gave us the idea of implementing kill switches; we decided not to work with kill switches on our project for practical reasons, but it was a worthwhile exploration and discussion. Moreover, this experience helped us to get a better understanding of iGEM and aroused great interest in this competition.

Purdue iGEM Collaboration

We collaborated with Purdue's iGEM team in many aspects of our project. We worked with the Purdue team to verify each other’s part characterization. We were exchanging transformed cells and the protocols we developed for characterization, making sure that each team had everything necessary for both characterization projects. We were also able to assist them with coding for the wiki, providing them with strategies to make their wiki more flexible to device size. This included information on tools such as viewport units and media queries. Purdue aided our wiki by pointing out errors that were not noticed by our team.

Working with Purdue, we are excited to learn about the details of how their project is working, as well as to teach them about our project. Verifying the characterization helps our project because this allows us to be sure we are fulfilling the Bronze 5 requirement properly. It also lets us help another team do the same on top of giving everyone a more diverse lab experience.