Team:UCL/Collaborations
Collaborations
One of the most exciting aspects of iGEM, for our team, has been collaborations. Collaborating with others reminded us that iGEM is not just a competition, but an invaluable opportunity to share ideas and learn new skills, with teams across the world. Our collaboration efforts were mainly distributed between our sustainability Little Leaf Challenge (with both Westminster and Oxford iGEM teams being particularly instrumental!) and troubleshooting wiki works or experimental protocols (shoutout to Chihuahua and USAFR Carroll in particular!). Below are some more details about the different universities that we collaborated with.
Little Leaf
University of Westminster - UK
As a part of our efforts to encourage other iGEM teams to become more sustainable in their approach to lab work, we created the LittleLeaf challenge. The first step involved a social media challenge, which encouraged other teams to complete the Emerald challenge checklist and posting pictures for completing each step. However, initially the checklist was not digitalised, hence we had no way of keeping track of the teams participating in our collaboration. Therefore, we worked with the University of Westminster iGEM team to digitalise the checklist so that teams completing our challenge could tick-off each step that they had completed.
Together with the Westminster team we created a webpage that can record the completion data of each team into a google spreadsheet. We worked on the html interface and the data transfer from html to google sheets and Westminster coded a script to sort through the recorded data.
University of Oxford - UK
We worked with the Oxford iGEM team on the second step of Little Leaf, which involved creating a Departure form that teams can complete for the future teams at their university or school. They provided very helpful feedback on the content of the form as well as its general design.
Participants
After completing University of Virginia iGEM Team's “Social Media Hub” collaboration, which involved completing a short survey, they completed our Emerald Challenge. They were great at uploading pictures for each step on our sustainability checklist and became inspiring role models for other iGEM teams with their eager participation in our challenge! We also want to thank all the other teams who participated in the Emerald Challenge and Little LEAF, including University of Virginia IGEM , Saint Joseph iGEM, Warwick iGEM , Sheffield iGEM University of Edinburgh, Overgraduate team and Cairo University iGEM.
Wiki
US AFRL CARROLL HS - Indiana, USA
At the start of the summer, we struggled with the wiki, as none of our team members were familiar with web coding or design. We were mentored by the US AFRL Carroll HS team on various aspects of wiki design, and the Wiki Guide was invaluable in guiding us through the wiki design process. Here is a picture of our confused messages to the team:
They helped us sort out our navigation bar!
iGEM Chihuahua - Mexico
The iGEM Chihuahua team was one of the first teams that we spoke to in the beginning of our project. Not only did they give us some public engagement inspiration, but they were also instrumental in aiding in our wiki design efforts. They told us to create wiki paper prototypes before starting to edit the code - allowing us to focus on our design without worrying too much about how to create it (until later :) ) - it also helped us organise our content.
Meet-ups
Newcastle University - UK
The Newcastle iGEM team hosted an all UK iGEM meet-up, which was an invaluable opportunity to connect with the other iGEM teams across the UK. We got to hear about other teams’ projects and present our own! It was very inspiring to learn more about the various efforts that other teams made, particularly in the Human Practices section of the competition. Further, being able to discuss and brainstorm with other teams helped us better develop the next steps in these efforts.
King's College London - UK
We are at a great advantage as compared to other iGEM teams, in that we have two fellow teams in the same city! As such we got to know them early on in the summer so we could brainstorm and troubleshoot. We met up at the beginning of the summer and discussed lots of modelling ideas as well as some wet lab techniques.
Mentoring
Team Gaston Day School - North Carolina, USA
We helped out the Gaston Day School iGEM team by providing them with protocols for protein purification as they were struggling with this.
