Meeting with iGem UANL and UAAAN
Since we began to develop our project, we looked for teams that were located close to us as an opportunity to share our ideas and look to opportunities to collaborate in the future. We kept close attention to team UANL and team UAAAN, as they belong to universities that have worked with past Tec-Monterrey teams.
Both teams contacted us so we could start sharing the projects we were elaborating. Once we agreed on a date to get together, both teams came to our college campus, where we opened a space for discussion. Each team had the opportunity to explain the theory behind their project and share the progress they had made so far.
During this first approach with both teams, we raised the possibility of collaborating, hosting the Latin American Meetup. After dropping hints through social media that we wanted to organize the meetup, another team contacted us, Tec-Chihuahua. Because they are located farther away than the 3 initial teams we had agreed to collaborate with, we started talking by video call. Finally, only formal collaboration was established between Tec-Monterrey, Tec-Chihuahua, and UANL, which is how the organization for the LATAM MEETUP began.
LATAM MEETUP
One of our main purposes was to innovate and build upon what other teams had achieved in the past, which is a little bit complicated, considering Latin America is a very large region and there are not very many teams compared to other regions.
We looked for different strategies to attract more participants from other iGEM teams and it occurred to us that probably more people would come if they had a reason to stay a little longer than the day that was going to last the meetup. This is why we put the dates of the International Congress GENOMA and the meetup together. August 29th and 30th would be the first one, while the 31st would be meetup. In addition, we wanted to provide workshops that would be useful to the iGEM community. These are usually more attractive than a conference, because it allows us to apply the knowledge acquired in our own projects.
The workshops that were imparted were the following:
- Modelling in Synthetic Biology
- What comes after iGEM
- How to organize your wiki
- iGEM for Dummies
We also organized the schedule to accommodate a space in which we had the workshops, a networking sessión and project presentations all in one day. Finally, in collaboration with iGEM Tec Chihuahua and UANL we hosted in Monterrey, N.L., a MeetUp for the Latin American region. The event occurred on August 31 in our campus facilities where we welcomed iGEM teams ITESO Guadalajara, Tec Chihuahua and UANL. The event started with the workshops mentioned above. We received good feedback on the content as it was not focused on a particular area or project, rather it could be applied by any iGEM team. Next, each team did a short poster presentation of their project and received feedback from PhD. Maximiliano Medina, MSc. Heber Torres and other iGEM teams. During the event we connected with more team Tec Chihuahua members via Zoom video chat and live broadcasted the workshops in our social media so other LATAM teams could follow up. The event meant a huge opportunity to network with after iGEMers and experts in Synthetic Biology. We also created strong bonds with iGEM teams in the region by sharing recommendations, presenting our work and pointing out their projects strengths and areas of opportunity.
iGEM Instagram Challenge
We got involved with other iGEM teams from all around the world in a Social Media Challenge organized by iGEM Stonybrook. For a whole week we participated in daily challenges which consisted in revealing our project, uploading videos of lab bonding, sharing agar art images among others. This collaboration helped us connect with other iGEM teams around the world and learn what they were preparing for the Giant Jamboree. It was also a great opportunity to integrate with many of the other teams that participated and to better connect with our social media audience, sharing relevant information to make us known and what we were working on for almost an entire year.
Team Tec-Guadalajara
In collaboration with team Tec-Guadalajara, we did a troubleshooting meeting through the Zoom, video chat platform. The team explained to us they were having problems with the correct ligation of their parts. We noticed we had some differences in our methods, such as the ligation time and amount of DNA we added to the reaction, so we shared with them our standardized protocols and some pro tips that worked well for us.
This was very helpful for us since last week before the videochat, we had trouble with the protocol which had worked for us in previous ligations. Tec-Guadalajara team managed to carry out the protocols with successful results (positive bacterial transformations), which indicated the reproducibility of our protocol and discard problems in our work.
In another video chat meeting we learned that Team Tec-Guadalajara had also experienced working with blind and visually impaired people (see “ Educational & Public engagement” section), so we asked them to collaborate with us on our Touch and Listen manual by sharing their experience designing a rally based on an educational model approved by the Ministry of Public Education, SEP by its acronym in Spanish. We shared in return our experience on designing materials based on Universal Design for Learning, which could help them make their educational rally become inclusive for people with visual disabilities.