Erwinions

Collaborations

Meetup

The "Mexican Teams Meetup" had several activities. Amongst them were a collaboration in Human Practices, which laid the foundations for the Laboratory Handbook, a guide that aims to introduce children from elementary school to science; and a presentation of the progress that we had until that point regarding our project, which aside from giving us an idea of how it will be to present in english, it also made us see our areas of opportunity, which consequently allowed us to improve and be able to be more competitive in the Giant Jamboree. Although these were the technical aspects of the meeting, it was thanks to this meetup that we were able to establish relationships with the members of the various teams that participated; this has not only helped us with things related to the project but has also made the iGEM community of Mexico closer and stronger than ever.

Aalto-Helsinki

Erwinions had the opportunity to do a great collaboration with the Aalto Helsinki Team in two different ways. The first collaboration was done when one of our team members, Alejandra Ogaz Ramos, was in Helsinki Finland. Since she was there, she had a conference with the team to discuss the ways both teams could have helped each other on their projects. During the conference, our team discovered that European Union legislation would not helped us with our project because mostly in all EU, the transgenic food is prohibited. Nevertheless, our team member went to the Aalto University on the 26 of July of the present year to help the other team members with a sample collection of sweat. The Helsinki´s team wanted to extract different types of sweat so they could run exams on them and determine the characteristics of the human sweat and if the place and climate influenced on the sweat production. As a matter of fact, our member spent a whole afternoon with the team in a sauna in order to obtain samples of the “Mexican sweat”. She can tell that it was quite a finish experience and that the other team members were very nice. The greatest discovery was that our team member didn’t sweat at all, or at least as the Aalto team would have imagined, definitely because the temperature climate of the finnish sauna is likely like the normal summer weather in Chihuahua. So, because of that our member, spent like 3 hours and the sauna and finally could got some little drops of “Mexican sweat”. The second time of collaboration was when our team member did a research for legal issues on patents, their effects and time duration, that the Aalto team was looking in order to use dermicidin in their project.

Tec-Guadalajara

Unfortunately, the iGEM Tec-Guadalajara team got their kit too late and it seemed to be damaged also. This problem did not allow them to perform the necessary transformation required to do the later characterizations to complete the bronce criteria. But this didn't stop them from doing their project; the collaboration between our teams, involved us to do two transformations that they needed, the first was BBa_I744204 -plate 3, well 20F-, in E. Coli BL21B3. The second part, BBa_K137055 -plate 4, well 13I-, was also transformed in E. Coli BL21B3. There was no inconvenience in the transformation protocol and the procedure was successful, with the expression of the corresponding proteins that Tec-Guadalajara needed for their transformation. The next day, on October 24th , both transformed bacteria were shipped through DHL from Chihuahua City to Guadalajara, Jalisco.

Tec-CEM

In order to promote and reinforce the relationship with our brother team Tec-CEM, we asked for their help to characterize one of our BioBricks, (T7 promoter + RBS) + (epsE) + (T1 terminator), which can be found here as a whole [BBa_K2471002], the individual parts being (BBa_K525998) + (BBa_K143032) + (BBa_B0010). This BioBrick is an essential part of our project, as their expression confers the capacity of inhibit the virulence factor of motility in the bacteria. The collaboration developed as follows: On October 15th, we shipped the BioBrick to Tec-CEM, which they characterized by SDS-PAGE. Once the results were obtained, they shared them with us, completing a successful collaboration.

IONIS PARIS

The IONIS Paris team contacted us for a team collaboration. We worked together for several months, mainly focussing in Human Practices and Modeling. The IONIS modeling team helped us to visualize one of our enzymes: “yhjH”, based on bibliography and the enzyme optimal conditions, they managed to simulate it in silico, helping us to establish and assume model parameters and enzyme behaviors, among other things. Besides it, our teams managed to collaborate in Human Practices. Based on the IONIS human practices project, some of our team members contacted winegrowers and oenologists to interview them about how climate change has affected their vineyards. The information gathered was used for a comparative framework between French and Mexican wine production actual adversities. During the meetings with the experts, we also discussed the IONIS team proposal, so they could let them know their points of view and their opinions about it. Therefore, the IONIS team got an international perspective of their project impact.

"We want to thank the team Tec-Chihuahua for their help and support for our human practice project, they help us to understand how farmers in Mexico deal with climate change and how we could use Softershock to solve the problem. They gave us information about synthetic biology in their country to put it on the interactive map in order to share their experiences with their country Mexico and the rest of the world." -Team IONIS Paris

Video Call with Alicia Magnanon from team IONIS Paris and mexican winegrower expert Consuelo Melendez (October 10th).

Greece

Team Greece worked on their big Human Practices campaign with a survey. They wanted to know the opinions of the PIs and Instructors of other teams around the world about their project and its social, public and health impact. They included a brief summary of their project to fill us in and after that, we send the survey to our team PIs and Instructors. They were happy to help because they are not often this involved in collaborations.

UNL

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln team and Tec-Chihuahua team collaboration goes back to the beginning of the summer. We first presented our projects to each other to get to know us a little better. Later on, the UNL team asked us to share their General Public Survey to get to know Mexicans opinions. At the end, we ended up video calling to officially meet each other and got a great feedback on our projects.

iGEM Collaborations Wikies

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Team:Tec-Chihuahua/Collaborations