Team:UPNAvarra Spain/Collaborations
Collaborations
Navarra_BG Collaboration
Navarra_BG Team,from Navarre, has worked on protein synthesis in order to make plants able to grow up in more acidic habitats.
We got in touch with them to share information and spent a whole morning with them! First, our team spoke about our project and our idea; and they did the same afterwards. In addition, we took advantage of the fact that they had already participated in iGEM before and asked them for advice. Thanks to them, we won’t be so lost with the iGEM Competition, experience is the mother of knowledge!
After that, each of us sent our name to Mars(in relation to their project); and finally, Miren Karmele Gómez Garmendia, coordinator of “Planeta STEM” educative programme in the planetarium of Pamplona and space enthusiast, let us adopt a bush(a Salix Integra Hakuro Nishiki) at the Galaxy Garden there, so we became “gardeners of the cosmos”, as they call it. In addition, Navarra_BG Team also adopted their own bush(a Hibiscus Syriacus). Thank you for your time!
Bilkent_UNAMBG Collaboration
Bilkent_UNAMBG Team,from Turkey, has developed its project around a very common disease: Diabetes Mellitus.
While carrying out their proposal, they wanted to create a storybook about synthetic biology. This team was looking forward to create a story that little children would be able to understand, so the next generation will a basic idea of what synthetic biology is capable of. In order to make it something more widespread, they decided to translate it to other languages, and they chose us to translate it to Spanish and Basque! Our linguists Daniel Palacios and Hugo Salas got the work done and collaborated with this great idea!
Virginia and UNSW_Australia Collaboration
Virginia Team,from the USA, and UNSW_Australia Team from Australia, had a very interesting idea. They wanted to create a directory where all the social media info of the teams could be found. Remember the days when you had to navigate from wiki to wiki searching for each team’s contact? Do not bother anymore! This way, competitors will have more facilities when contacting with other teams. Our team found these ideas really interesting, as keeping in touch with other teams is a very important part of this competition. Thus, we collaborated with this fantastic initiative.
Chihuahua Collaboration
Tec-Chihuahua Team,from Mexico, has developed its project around Verticillium Dahliae. Verticillium wilt is one of the most important crop diseases around the world. In some cases it accounts for a loss of 20% of crops in several regions, and in a single season it can cause an economic deficit of 3 million dollars. It affects more than 400 different plant species, which include cotton, potato, tomato, strawberry and avocado. After some weeks in touch and searching around our area, we discovered that the issue they’re working on was quite relevant in Navarre! So, as they were trying to make their project more widespread, we told them that their results might be useful here too!
US_AFRL_CarrollHS Collaboration
US_AFRL_CarrollHS Team,from the USA, have made their “Mike the Microbe” collaborations very popular. In this one, teams take a photo with Mike at the lab and share it in their social media. We didn’t have to wait very long for him to become very popular at our laboratory, and we couldn’t stop taking photos with him! Sadly, we could only post five of them in our social media… Now, there are pictures of Mike with a thermomixer, Mike helping our teammates in the studio, Mike having a shower… Even scientists outside our project had the pleasure to meet Mike!
Saint_Joseph Collaboration
Saint_Joseph Team,from Turkey, had a very interesting idea: a meme competition! Quite a fun thing to do as sometimes lab work can be very stressful. Our team’s official meme creators, Daniel Palacios and Álex Pascual started with it and, after several attempts, they managed to make the best meme instagram has ever seen.
This team’s project is about developing reproducible and cheap methods of isolation of laccase production, which is commonly used for biological cleaning of contaminated areas, such as textile wastewaters mixed with dyes. As a collaboration, they also made a wastewater survey to gather information about this issue around the world. In order to help them with their project, we also filled their survey!
UPNAvarra_Spain worldwide!
The UPNAvarra_Spain Team, is glad to announce that scientists from all over the world have been interested in our project!
In order to test our biosensors, we decided to collect water samples from different rivers of our region and analyze them in our lab to check whether the water was polluted by nitrates or heavy metals. Our team had quite an intense day around Southern Navarre, collecting all the samples and preparing them (you can check our whole adventure here).
After analyzing our samples, we wanted to spread our project beyond our borders, so we decided to contact different iGEM teams and offered them a collaboration with us. We were happy to see that many people was willing to collaborate with our project, sending us water and land samples from different places across the world.
The first team to reach us was Athens Team,from Greece. They have been working on aptamers, oligonucleotides and small peptides that bind specifically to a target molecule, quite comparable to an antibody. They thought our idea was very interesting and, since they have been also working with biosensors, they provided us with more samples to examine from their regions. Thank you so much guys!
There was also a team from South America collaborating with us! Costa_Rica Team,who is working on an innovative method to treat Clostridium difficile infection, a very common disease in their country. The samples were taken from Pirro river, near their University. Some of their team’s members had the chance to come to Barcelona and they sent us the samples from there. Thank you so much!
Washington Collaboration
Washington Team,from United States, whose project aims to find an alternative way for biosensors to detect hydrophobic molecules in biological systems, had an idea to spread synthetic biology.
In order to explain synthetic biology basics to younger people, they prepared a some activities to do with kids in the classroom. As they wanted it to be more widespread, they asked us to translate some of them to Basque. Hugo from our team translated a couple of them and as he showed them to us, we thought they were very original and interesting! Great work!
TUDelft Collaboration
TUDelft Team, from Netherlands, whose project is about designing and creating a fusion protein in order to help with the issue of gene doping, wanted to help new iGEM teams by creating a series of short videos where the basic information about iGEM was taught. As they thought this was a very interesting idea, they opened up a collaboration where other teams could submit their ideas for new videos. We had a brainstorming, and finally, we decided that we wanted to help future iGEM teams by explaining them the basics of iGEM’s website and where to find the relevant info on it. We are happy to help future iGEM competitors!