Collaborations

Collaboration with Team Lund

Our team had the pleasure of collaborating with the Lund iGEM Team over the course of the summer. We discovered their project PRODEACC, a genetically modified probiotic bacteria that absorbs harmful heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and mercury from a person’s gut and GI-tract, and reached out to them due to their interest in heavy metals. Their team member, Viktor Ekström, suggested that we create a podcast episode for their podcast series “The iGEM Lund Show” After emailing back and forth for the course of two months, we settled on a day and time to have a Skype session, and Viktor recorded the session and posted it on Team Lund’s Facebook page. It was a truly wonderful opportunity to work with Team Lund and discuss the effects heavy metals have on the environment and the health of those exposed to them.

Collaboration with Team Orléans

Another team we worked with over summer was the brand new iGEM team, Team Orléans! When we first connected with Team Orléans we discussed what our projects were, why we chose them, and what we hoped to accomplish with them. We learned that a portion of their project aimed to develop a bacteria that would remove heavy metals (lead and cadmium) from the sludge of water treatment plants. After our initial conversations about our projects, Team Orléans suggested we try to share our sensor with them so they could test it for us at the water treatment plant near their campus, and they would send us their modified bacteria to see if it would remove lead from a sample of water found in our community. However, both teams had concerns with lab work which prevented this opportunity from moving forward quickly enough to collect sound data.

Collaboration with Team US AFRL / Carroll HS

Their team wrote up a wiki guide and sent it to our team. We sent them suggestions on how to improve their guide. We also participated in their #mikethemicrobe social media challenge. We took pictures with their mascot and uploaded on them our instagram page.

Collaboration with Team Rice

We answered some questions about project selection for their team which they will include in their meta-analysis of how the location of the team affects the team’s project selection.

Collaboration with Milwaukee School of Engineering

This year we are very appreciative of the work Alexander Neurwirth from Milwaukee School of Engineering executed to construct and implement our Wiki! He took the numerous ideas our team had and formatted them into a clear, professional, and purposeful way to display the work we completed on our project. We could not have had nearly as successful of a Wiki if not for the work of Xander.

Collaboration with Hamburg

Team Hamburg is working on making a directory of project abstracts that are easy for anyone, even those without a scientific background, to understand. Our team put together an easy to understand abstract for them to add to their directory.

Collaboration with UNSW

We filled out our team information in a spreadsheet to make it easier for other teams to find/contact us.

Collaboration with Strasbourg

They sent us a form about food allergies on our team that we filled out and returned to them.

Silver

Team WLC-Milwaukee has collaborated with a few teams this year, but mainly with Teams Lünd, Orléans, Hamburg, and US AFRL/Carroll HS. We worked on everything from podcasts to social media to working out how to share our engineered bacteria.

Team:WLC-Milwaukee/Collaborations