With both teams needing to design a bioreactor, we collaborated with Western iGEM to help mentor and pool resources to better develop our models and aid each other through the process. We guided them through the basic designs and modeling while troubleshooting challenges faced with tank designs, biochemistry, and kinetics of the systems.
iGEM Guelph
As a team of only three years, iGEM Guelph came to our team seeking mentorship in applying modeling and machine learning into their project. Our wet and dry lab leads taught and walked through the basics of computational modeling of their biological mechanism and pathway that they are tackling this year. Additionally, we described the basics of machine learning, how it could be applied to biology as a whole and specific areas in their project. By the end of our skype call sessions, members from iGEM Guelph had a better understanding of dry lab work and were able to begin thinking of ways in which they could model their current and future team’s projects.
iGEM Queens
iGEM Queens had a project to educate the public sphere about synthetic biology with help from other iGEM teams across the world. Wanting to participate in this event, they sent us questions that were supposed to be answered in a fun and accessible manner, and videotape our responses.
iGEM TAS_Taipei
iGEM TAS, iGEM Tuebingen, and iGEM Costa Rica co-hosted a video conference on September 14th about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations and how these goals can relate to our project to further our impact on society. We participated in the conference and made a video introducing our project as a whole and which specific SDGs our project can be related to. During the conference, we discussed ways that we can integrate our project to current society, current issues and perspectives related to our project, and other topics related to the human practices portion of our project.
Link to video:
iGEM Toronto SDGs video
iGEM USP-Sao Carlos Brazil
With one of their members doing an internship in Toronto, we decided to invite them to join us on an episode of our podcast, SynTalks, speaking about our respective iGEM teams and the challenges we face running the teams in our cities. This included dry lab member Henrique D'Ambrosio Retti de Andrade and iGEM Toronto president Amy Yeung. They dive into how they got in to iGEM and the problems we have and still are facing, as well as what we have overcome being on the team for many years.
iGEM Cairo (CU iGEM)
Having trouble with transformations of reporter genes (BBa_K1073024, BBa_K1073026, BBa_K1073022, BBa_J04450), and unable to determine the exact cause of their problem, CU iGEM asked us to help with their experiments and transform the exact same parts. Using our own transforming protocols, we were able to transform some of their parts, but not all were successful. Regardless, we gave them back our results and protocols to use, so they could continue their experiments. We hope that everything went well with their future experiments!
oGEM (Western iGEM, iGEM Guelph, Queens iGEM, Waterloo iGEM, McMaster iGEM, iGEM Laval)
iGEM Toronto once again participated in this year’s oGEM conference, an annual gathering of iGEM teams across Ontario. This year there were 2 conferences, the first in mid-July and the second conference at the beginning of October. During the July meet-up, we presented our project idea and preliminary work, while networking with the other 2019 Ontario iGEM teams, including Western, Guelph, Queens, and Laval University. During the second get together we presented our final project works in a more professional manner, and networked again with not only other Ontario teams, including Waterloo and McMaster University, but also with the industry partner, Ontario Genomics. Through both conferences, we gave and received feedback on our presentation and asked questions to better the overall iGEM community within the province.
