Team:Linkoping Sweden/Collaborations
We joined our local towns city festival in the end of summer. Before this festival we considered other countries projects and wanted to find some interesting projects to share at the festival. We found three projects that seemed extra interesting and we wrote to the teams and asked if they were interested in a collaboration. We wanted to show the public the diversity of what syntetic biology can be used for. The projects who caught our attention was Valencia UPVs project chatter plant, AQA Unseps project Insubiota and SECA NZs project with frost-resistance in fruit. We wrote the teams and were very happy when all three teams were interested in collaborating with us.
The teams wrote us simplified summaries of their project descriptions and we hung these up at the
city festival. A lot of people read about the projects and were surprised that these kinds of things
could be done, they thought it sounded surreal. We had read the project descriptions and other
information on the team’s wiki and were there to answer the questions that were raised.
We are very thankful for this collaboration and it gave us an opportunity to mediate the importance
of syntetic biology and the platform for young individuals to get a chance to try and implement their
ideas. We chose these projects because we thought their projects really could contribute to a better
world and that this fact would make it easier for the public to see the importance of iGEM.
Harvard (USA)
A collaboration with Harvard iGEM 2017 was initiated during this summer. We helped them design questions around biomanufacturing. Three other teams were also a part of this collaboration. These teams were AQA_Unesp, Aalto-Helsinki and Hamburg. The survey was aimed at people within the general population, academics, industry, pharmaceutical regulation, politics etc. and included question like;
- What comes to mind when somebody say biomanufacturing? Do you know what it is?
- How acceptable to you is using biomanufacturing to produce cosmetics?
- What are the main ways that you see academic research relating to biomanufacturing as different from industrial research related to biomanufacturing?
- What do you think you or the government could do in order to encourage the industry to change its way of production to biomanufacturing?
All the contributed questions from the teams were compiled by team Harvard and a Google Form was created. The survey was then sent out to as many people as possible in the areas of interest.
The result from the survey came from 30 people from the countries Brazil, Finland, France, Sweden
and USA. The majority of these people (16) was involved within the academia, nine of these had
industry as primary area of expertise, two participants who answered were politicians and three
participants answered “other area” than those areas mentioned above.
The survey consisted of several statements where the survey-takers could indicate their level of
agreement. The statements appeared in different ways depending on how the participants
answered. Results from a few of these statements can be seen in the three figures below.
A few questions in the end of the survey had open-ended questions, which we thought was very
interesting.
Some of the answers to the question “what are the major roadblocks to the progress of the field of
biomanufacturing?” included; environmental safety issue, costs, development difficulties, market
acceptance and biosafety.
An answer that occurred several times, and people thought could be a problem, was about the
governmental regulations and the laws. However, these responses did not come from any politicians.
When the survey-takers gave their opinions about what they thought will be the direction of the field
of biomanufacturing, medicine/the pharmaceutical industry was a repeated answer from many. A
few other answers, to give some examples, were – focus on specialty chemicals, additives in
cosmetics, replacement in current animal based food production and rationally designed cells as
biofactories.
Through this survey, we have obtained a good overview about people’s interest, knowledge and
thoughts about biomanufacturing.
Minnesota (USA)
Minnesota iGEM 2017 had a Google Form about retaining the safety within the responders iGEM-projects. LiU iGEM answered this form.
DTU-Denmark (Denmark), SDU-Denmark (Denmark), UCopenhagen (Denmark), Aalto-Helsinki (Finland), Chalmers-Gothenburg (Sweden), Stockholm (Sweden), Uppsala (Sweden) and Lund (Sweden)
LiU iGEM took part of Nordic iGEM Coference (NiC) hosted by the team of Copenhagen Denmark. The participating teams took part of workshops, had a mini-jamboree and were able to give each other feedback and get some “presenting skills”. The teams that participated together with us were DTU-Denmark, SDU-Denmark, UCopenhagen, Aalto-Helsinki, Chalmers-Gothenburg, Stockholm, Uppsala and Lund.
