Description:
Namaste fellow iGEMers!

iGEM is not only a platform for students to showcase their scientific expertise but also to spread the ideas of synthetic biology. Therefore, this year’s iGEM team of Indian Institute of Science(IISc) has come up with a fun & engaging way to collaborate with other iGEM teams via a unique challenge, the ‘Sorting CereMonera.’

In this challenge, all the participating iGEM teams will play the role of the SORTING HAT (from the popular Harry Potter universe). They will sort microorganisms (bacteria, fungi or viruses) into different Houses/Characters of Harry Potter and/or Game of Thrones. Teams will have to justify their sorting creatively, through a picture, drawing, video or comic strip which must then be posted on Instagram (tagging our ID and hashtag). We intend to show the best comic strips and ideas to students during our sessions in schools and colleges. And of course, the most creative team wins a small prize from us.

Since the Harry Potter and Game of Thrones fan communities are extremely widespread, with this challenge, we hope to ignite a spark among the non-scientific community to encourage learning. Thus, we not only expect the challenge to be a good team building exercise but we also aim to reach out to a larger community and spread knowledge about biology.

Cheers.

Thanking you,
iGEM team
Indian Institute of Science 2019

Description:
Do you have what it takes to make a SINGLE labcoat, into something ready for the runway? Stony Brook iGEM presents the #labcoatchallege

How it works:
Take one standard lab coat, and without cutting, sewing, duct tape, etc, ONLY by tying, make the lab coat into an outfit other than the standard lab coat use. DO NOT DO THIS IN THE LAB, lab coats should only be worn in the standard way, when in the lab.

When your team has come up with their design, have a member “model” it off by walking down a “runway” to whatever music you think matches your outfit design. Once you have created your design, post your video on your team's Instagram page and tag @igem.stonybrook and one other team that you are challenging to a "walk off." The challenge will start July 1st and end July 14th... and the winner will be announced! Email the Stony Brook team at igem.sbu [AT] gmail.com or DM us @igem.stonybrook on Instagram to sign up and participate! The submissions will be posted on JULY 15th on our team’s Instagram, @igem.stonybrook, Twitter, @IGEMSBU, and our Facebook page, @iGEM at Stony Brook, where you can cast your votes for which design you like best!

Best of luck to the competitors!
Stony Brook iGEM 2019 Team

Description:
Hi fellow iGEM teams!
We'd like you to join us in promotion of our project by making a collaborative comic with us. For this we need three photos of you (one about you running away, another about you entering a building - preferably your university with its visible name, and the last one in a building, scared). Please, if you're interested - send them till 7th of July. Best photos will be included in the comic!

Description:
This year our team is working to optimize our last year's device which uses CRISPR to help in the diagnosis of autosomal recessive diseases. If you have any experience in modeling proteins or testing their activity, please contact us! We would also like to help any of the iGEMers in sequencing, FLO cytometry, and protein purification. We look forward to working with other teams and adding to this collaborative platform.

Description:
The wiki is a vital part in telling the judges, public, current, and past iGEM teams about your team. Here's another vital iGEM truth - everyone dreads the wiki freeze and many teams are hesitant to begin their wiki. It can be a struggle, but we're here to help.

What are we doing? We're putting together a wiki wealth of knowledge - a comprehensive guide that combines all wiki knowledge from teams past and present, source code that you can use on your wiki, and a YouTube video series where we walk you through all the major things you need to know about everything wiki related.

Who are we looking to help us? Everyone. We need first year teams to give us feedback on if our guide covers all of their questions and how it helped them create their wiki. We need teams to write up a couple bullet points describing how they create their wiki. If you use our guide/video series in any way, please let us know so that we can make sure to thank you on our collaborations page!

What inspired us? We are a third year team who puts many hours into our wiki every year. Our very first year, we collaborated with a team who answered a lot of our initial questions about how to code our wiki; this helped us immensely and helped to inspire this collaboration.

Thank you so much and we can't wait to hear from you about your wikis!
US_AFRL_CarrollHS (yes, the Mike the Microbe team - see collaboration request #9)

Description:
This year, Tufts iGEM is interested in improving upon the electrical concentration sensor in Shewanella, designed by Cornell 2012. We are interested in enhancing the sensing accuracy and precision, as well as expanding the sensor for use in detecting other chemicals.

If you have an idea for a promoter or other regulatory element dependent on presence of a chemical, please don't hesitate to message us about it! Better yet, if you are working on a sensor/detection project yourself, we could try our sensor output with your sensing design!

Description:
The iGEMxSDGs challenge aims to promote the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations. The iGEM teams are challenged to map their project to 1 to 4 SDGs and post about it online. A template to keep the usage guidelines of the UN is proposed on our official collaboration subsite: https://2019.igem.org/Team:Costa_Rica/SDG-Challenge. The iGEMxSDGs challenge is spead on social media by being tagged by a team that has already completed the challenge. Each team will call 3 to 4 other teams to follow them. The mappings will be stored in the gallery of our website.

The challenge will launch on June 22nd 2019.

A contact for the challenge is: igemxsdgs [AT] gmail.com

The contact for the video conference on 14th September hosted by Team Taipei: igemtas [AT] gmail.com

Description:
Hello, fellow iGEMmers! This year, our team's project is the construction of a UV radiation-resistant fermenting yeast, that could be used to optimize fermentation processes in alcohol industries and also in the future colonization of other planets, such as Mars.

In order to test if our engineered yeast would actually survive in an environment as hostile as Mars, we had planned to perform experiments on a stratospheric probe, since the stratosphere has comparable conditions to the Red Planet when it comes to radiation incidence, pressure, and temperature. In order to find out if and how we could do that, we have decided to conduct an overall review on different countries' and space agencies' legislation on stratospheric and space experimentation, to understand what was expected in cases like this.

So far, we have found little to no information on the topic since most legislations only discuss biological experimentation inside a laboratory or planned releases, and this case fits in neither. We also found some legislation in Brazil related to experimentation on a "containment regimen", but no specifications on what this "containment" would be.

This is why we need your help! And you can do so by answering some of our questions about this kind of legislation on your country on this form: https://forms.gle/YvDiCXtohfJcZ5oc7.

Feel free to leave any of the questions blank if you can't find the information requested, and if you have any doubts please contact us at ufscar.igem2018 [AT] gmail.com. Thank you!

Description:
Hello fellow iGEM teams. We at MIT-ADT University are working on the menace of ever increasing plastic wastes, particularly menstrual waste. As part of our project we would like to assess the level of awareness regarding menstrual waste in countries across the globe. iGEM provides us with an excellent opportunity to do so, facilitating you, our fellow iGEMers to take part in this survey and help us approach our project with a more holistic outlook.

You can help us by filling in the survey available at the below link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScw5PZeZnLlQxLopdcVJgRFIousLC3GmkjvvceOwzG8ZYq1EQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Do feel free to contact us and share your views, experiences and ideas about the plastic waste crisis we find ourselves in. You can find us at: Igem.mitadtbio.pune [AT] gmail.com or @igemsbsr on Instagram

Note: None of the questions are a compulsion and you can skip any of them while your responses will remain anonymous.

Description:
Bonjour fellow iGEM teams,

We, Nantes iGEM team, are really excited to announce that we will be holding an iGEM art exposition here in Nantes at the end of August! We would love to be able to present works of art that express Synthetic Biology through any creative means you are inspired by. To help the flow of creative juices we have come up with three themes that might spark more interest for you:

• The position of Humans in Synthetic Biology
• The fusion of 2 different worlds (Engineering and Biology)
• The impact of Synthetic Biology on the world.

To participate please contact us by email or through our social media (@IGEMNantes) and we will give you more specific details concerning our adress, exact dates etc. You can then send in your artwork digitally (photography, digital artwork) or by mail (painting, sculpture, etc...) by August 9th.

Your team is completely welcome to be present during the art exposition :)

Description:
Hi 2019 iGEM teams! As you may know iGEM 2019 does not have an Interlab. So this year we wanted to invite teams from any country to participate in Minterlab (Mini Interlab)!

What is Minterlab? Minterlab takes the concept of having scientists around the world working on one experiment and enables scientific experimentation to elementary and middle schoolers through an Interlab-like opportunity.

How does it work? Teams around the world will host camp sessions that are 5 days long. Each day will have lessons will be 1-2 hours. However when and where a camp session is held can be chosen by the hosting team. One Minterlab session should cover a curriculum that we will prepare together (but feel free to put your own spin on it!) as well as the main Minterlab experiment which we can develop together. At the end of the summer, we will compile all the “data” accumulated from the Minterlab sessions across the world and compile it on one website for everyone to see!

If you are interested in further details or wish to participate in Minterlab, please email igem [AT] sound.bio by *June 23rd 2019 11:59 PM PST*

Description:
Each year, we send out our team mascot, Mike the Microbe, as a "Flat Stanley" and ask other teams to take pictures with him and post them on social media. We would like to do that again this year, along with sending our newest mascot, Chia the Chitinase.

Description:
Hello fellow iGEM teams!
You are invited to take participate in our one week Instagram Challenge starting on Sunday, June 16th! The goal is to promote unity between the iGEM teams, and increase iGEM teams’ internet footprint through social media postings! We have created a theme for each day for one week:

• Sunday: Introduce your Project #iGEMproject2019
• Monday: Meme Monday #mememonday
• Tuesday: Agarart #iGEMagarart
• Wednesday: Lab bonding, photo of your team hanging out outside of the lab #iGEMTeam
• Thursday: Fail day #labfails
• Friday: Vine/Youtube video remake done your way #makeittheiGEMway
• Saturday: Shenanigans #iGEMShenanigans

The Instagram challenge will take place from June 16th through June 22nd. Please let us know if your team will be participating so we can feature your posts on our pages: our team’s Instagram, @igem.stonybrook, Twitter, @IGEMSBU, and our Facebook page, @iGEM at Stony Brook.

Thank you and we look forward to seeing what posts your teams come up with!
Stony Brook 2019 iGEM Team

Description:
Hello fellow iGEM teams! This year, our team is dedicated to creating a protocol handbook in addition to our main project. The purpose is to make synthetic biology techniques easier and more accessible for future endeavors and iGEM teams. We believe that the wealth of knowledge and unique techniques from teams across the globe will make lab life easier, fun and interesting. Thus, the virtual donation box is made so that protocols from different iGEM teams are free to view and try. It is highly appreciated if your team could contribute by uploading a few protocols to our virtual donation box.

Please indicate the type of protocol, your team name and country in the title for the files. Example: E.coli Inoculation - uOttawa iGEM (Canada)

Invite to the donation box: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AlC9Wk9pEy1uqpixq8MmoctnYnYWDhBp

If your team is having trouble sharing the protocol on the weblink, feel free to send us an email and we will place it in for you.
Thank you and hope to see you all at the Giant Jamboree.

Description:
We would like to gather all aptamers-related iGEM 2019 Teams, in order to set up the iGEM Aptamers Hub. The iGEM Aptamers Hub shall serve as a shared resource for all iGEM teams that are doing a project using aptamers. This hub will contain information on aptamers, their uses, wet and dry lab protocols/tools, past iGEM aptamer projects, organised aptamer-related parts from the registry, etc. We hope that this will allow more teams to integrate the use of aptamers in their projects and find the information or expertise they might be lacking.

If your team is focusing or just using aptamers this year and you would like to contribute to the iGEM Aptamers Hub, please contact us at igemaptamers [AT] gmail.com.

Description:
iGEM is an organization that is driven by young people's idealism. Because of this, iGEM provides the perfect atmosphere to drive progress within STEM both technically and socially. Creating an inclusive space starts by being aware of the shortcomings of the organization, and from there moving to address any issues that prevent the organization from achieving diversity.

The UAlberta iGEM team is interested in investigating the age, sex, gender, and race demographics of iGEM teams, to examine if there are any inclusion disparities in iGEM teams, and learn more about iGEMers experiences so that any issues can be remedied.

How you and your team can help us is by completing this survey https://forms.gle/uTTwJ9RV5ciN8f5S9, and emailing us to share your thoughts about inclusivity in iGEM.

Note: You can skip any questions on the survey that you would like, and will remain anonymous. If you or your team would like to fill out the survey in another language please email us as we have translated the survey into a verity of languages to make it as accessible as possible!

Description:
Greetings fellow iGEM Teams!
This year our team's lab address was relocated----we got a brand new lab !
Our team members hope to redesign our lab. So we hope to get help from your team.

You can help us in this way:
1.Draw a plan of your lab and give us some photographs of your lab.
2.Briefly introduce the main laboratory apparatus in the laboratory.
3.We are willing to know what experiment your lab can do. (The more detailed the better)
4.Show a picture of your dream synthetic biology lab in your email and add a detailed description.
If we successfully receive your email, we will promptly reply it and appreciate your help in our team's wiki. Also, we will select the best design we think and show it in our wiki.
PS: At the jamboree, we will bring a mysterious gift from China to your team as a ‘thank you’.

Description:
Greetings fellow iGEM Teams!

Have you ever imagined having less work in the laboratory? Being able to outsource it somehow, to focus on other (important) tasks? Well, we did! In recent years automated lab processes have improved.

Our contribution to the iGEM-Opentrons-Community will be a colony picking bot, more precisely, modules and scripts, that allow others iGEM Teams to turn their own OT-2 into a colony picking robot.

To achieve this goal we need the help of other iGEM Teams. We need to train the artificial intelligence with data, so that it is able to recognise the colonies by itself. This is where we need your help: As most iGEM Teams are working with E. Coli, it would be nice if you could provide us with pictures of your agar plates with colonies! So that we are able to compile a large database of pictures to train the AI.

We will publish every script, code and module we create and we also give away some prizes! The first ten teams that send us 100 pictures will get some small surprise and the team which sends us the most pictures until 31st of July will get a bigger surprise!

All further informations for the collaboration, like registration form and instructions, can be found at www.vinca.de/igem.

Thank you for participating and helping us out!

Greetings from Marburg,
your SYNTEX Team

Description:
This year, Lambert iGEM is partnering with the Thirst Project, the largest youth-led water organization in the world, to build an international iGEM well for a community in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland). Our goal is to raise $12,000 to change the lives of these villagers through the combined effort of international iGEM teams! We would love your help raising donations, and we will be sure to put your team's name on the iGEM well for any amount contributed. Collaborate with us while making a difference. Thank you so much! Let's end the water crisis together!

Here is the link to our fundraising page! https://my.thirstproject.org/team/216038

Description:
Hello iGEM Teams,
As we all know, iGEM is not only about our projects, but also about engaging the public with synthetic biology. In order to do so, the previous iGEM teams of the Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf created a project to promote synthetic biology in public by using self-designed postcards. Each year the amount of participating iGEM teams has grown, with a big pool of beautiful and funny postcards as a result. We would like to continue this community effort one more time and ask YOU to be a part of this collaboration.

How does it work? Every participating team designs a postcard which shows an image related to synthetic biology (or your topic) on the front and a small informational text on the back. Afterwards each team sends a package with their postcards to us, they are exchanged with the postcards from other teams, and the package is sent back. In the end, every participating iGEM-team is going to have collected postcards from all over the world. The received postcards can then be shared with people in the neighborhood, during public events, at the Giant Jamboree etc.If you want to check out the previously designed postcards for inspiration, visit the wiki of Duesseldorf 2016, the wiki of Duesseldorf-Cologne 2017 or the wiki of Dueseldorf 2018.

How to design your postcards: Standard postcard format (A6; 14,8cm x 10,5cm) Image related to your project or synthetic biology on the front Small informational text on the back If you are interested in joining us, please let us know until the 15th of June, so we can figure out how many postcards each team should print and send. Please don't forget to include your address! Important: This is not the deadline for sending and designing the postcard!

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!
Much love,
iGEM Team Duesseldorf 2019