Team:Uppsala/Attributions

Attributions

This page is dedicated towards the amazing people who helped out in this project in various ways. You are highly regarded by everyone on the iGEM Uppsala 2017 team, and have our eternal gratitude. We have many people to thank. From our families and friends that have listened to our highs and lows during the competition to all of the people that showed up to our events. Unfortunately, we cannot name every single person specifically but here you can read names of the people that we simply could never omit. We would of course like to extend our gratitude to all of those who did not fit to this page and to everyone in iGEM HQ who are working tirelessly to make the whole iGEM possible for us.

Professor/Advisors

Our appreciation goes to Anders Virtanen, Anthony Forster, Michael Nissbäck, Sethu Madhava Rao Gunja, Margareta Krabbe and Gunnar Johansson for their valuable feedback and their guidance during this project.

We would also like to thank lab assistants Sangeeta Boopalan and Delyan Georgiev. that helped us during the summer to get started in the lab.

A special thank you to Emil Marklund for all the guidance, the tremendous amount of help and dedication for making us successful in the project: “a once in a lifetime opportunity!”. Lastly, we are also very grateful to Elf lab for providing lab space and equipment during autumn.

Our team would also like to express a special appreciation and thanks to Erik Wistrand-Yuen who provided us with the lambda red starting strains, the protocols and who spent hours guiding and instructing us and providing practical help. Without him this success would not have been possible.

Panel Discussion

As a continuation of the webinars, our team decided to include the public opinion on how they feel about different ethical issues and questions surrounding biology. We wanted to organize a discussion that could engage not only students of biology and members of iGEM teams but also researchers and the general public. This would not be an easy task for a professional, let alone us, who never organized an event before. Fortunately, iGEM Stockholm was willing to share the responsibilities so we managed to organize a lively and interesting discussion in Stockholm - with three speakers who are the experts in the field of synthetic biology, legal matters, and ethical issues. The audience engagement during the discussion wasamazing and even exceeded our expectations. This created an interesting platform for us to learn more about how other people from different social and political background perceived biotechnology and its advancements.

Nordic Meetup

The iGEM Nordic Meetup (NIC) originated in Uppsala in 2015 as an opportunity to meet other teams from Northern Europe, get some feedback on your projects and to set ground for future collaborations for the teams. It became a tradition that the next NIC is hosted by a team that wins the best presentation contest during the meetup. This year, teams have met in Copenhagen at an event hosted by iGEM UCopenhagen. During the first day we bonded over games and activities provided by the team. The second day was spent with lectures helping us with various issues that we might run into during iGEM competition such as communication with media or ethical issues. Each team also presented their project and gained feedback from iGEM judges to adress possible critical issues they might experience. Lively discussions continued until late night hours with a BBQ dinner prepared. Best presentation award this year went to the newest team in the Nordic iGEM world: iGEM Lund. The voting by other iGEM teams' representatives was almost unanimous and in agreement with the judges' opinions. It was clear that iGEM Lund has almost never ending enthusiasm about their project and unique spirit and attitude among the teams! But even though we did not win the prize our team still got a shoutout from the judges for having a reasonable and interesting project. We also got a great and interesting feedback and suggestions from other teams that helped us a lot while progressing in the project. Thanks to NIC we got the chance to meet other teams that our close to us and it gave us a great base for the other collaborations we had during the competition. Teams represented at NIC: DTU-Denmark, SDU Denmark, UCopenhagen, Aalto-Helsinki, Chalmers-Gothenburg, Linköping_Sweden, Stockholm, Uppsala, Lund.

Postcards

This year, our team had a very active and talented graphical design group. We decided to take part in a collaboration organised by iGEM Düsseldorf Cologne. The team was tasked to design a postcard related to synthetic biology and iGEM. Then we exchanged these postcards with other teams! This collaboration was a great fun and a chance to get to know other teams and their projects a little bit better.

iGEM Lund

As a first year team for iGEM it is hard to know what to expect and it is very valuable to get all the help you can. Uppsala has been in the competition for 9 years running. We have a lot of experience and knowledge to share with a starting team. Representatives from Lund and Uppsala met at NIC conference and decided to talk about how to run a team. We had a Skype meeting with Lund to share general tips and tricks for running an iGEM team. The tips were everything from how present in the best possible way at the Jamboree to organization of the team. Lund initiated most of the general questions and we were happy to help out. We hope that our advice has helped them and we thought it was a great way to share our experience.