Team:Tartu TUIT/Collaborations
iGEM Vilnius-Lithuania
Our first collaboration took place in March, when the iGEM Vilnius-Lithuania team came to Tartu for a visit! They gave us some valuable pieces of advice as to how to successfully manage our whole project. Furthermore, they additionally described the different spheres we ought to pay special attention to i.e. human practices, public relations, modelling ect. For our team’s first iGEM experience this collaboration was very valuable as it gave us a better understanding of what steps we need to take in order to yield a successful project. We briefly discussed their idea for this year's competition. During the collaboration weekend we organized an excursion to the Estonian Genome Center - we had a really informative and science-filled weekend!
Unesp AQA iGEM
In May we got a collaboration request from a Brazilian team and altogether came up with some great collaboration ideas. As UNESP AQA was focusing on Diabetes type 1, we helped them to gather the data comprising Diabetes type 1 frequency, treatment possibilities and costs in Estonia and Europe. Brazilian team helped us with gathering information on ethylene production in Brazil and setting up our crowdfunding campaign. Our collaboration lasted for 2 months via various emails and online calls.
Peshawar iGEM
In the middle of the summer we contacted a Peshawar team and had interesting conversations via Skype calls concerning our projects. From that we gained some useful advice and a good feedback on our concept.
Toronto iGEM
In the beginning of July, the University of Toronto’s iGEM team invited us to participate in their podcast exploring how synthetic biology intersects with different disciplines ranging from engineering, law, business to the arts. We gladly decided to take part in it and on 12th of August, we had a meeting with one of the team leaders from Toronto, in Tartu. We had an interesting conversation during which we introduced our team, project and also discussed the further development and real-world application of our project.
Aalto-Helsinki iGEM
After several Skype calls, on the 24.08 another half of our team travelled to Helsinki to have a bilateral collaboration with Aalto-Helsinki team. We were having problems with our wiki and they prepared a workshop for us on that theme. This workshop was essential for us as we learn how to improve our wiki page. We had a very nice discussion on their project and our team gave them helpful ideas on how to improve their project (such as the use of different polymers, possible problems and troubleshooting of polymers´ derivatization with ligands, and ideas on how to test their product without the need for using pathogenic bacteria).
