Team:UT-Knoxville/Collaborations
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Team:UT-Knoxville/Team
UTK
iGEM
Background
Team Aachen has consistently been successful in the iGEM competition, winning three gold medals in a row. I wanted to see how, as part of a team that had just won its first gold medal in 2016, how we could improve our team. Our main obstacles this year were fundraising and group dynamic.
Project Discussion
We held a short interview over the summer (find date in journal) where we went over a general summary of each other’s projects. They described to us the following details: The Aachen team will be taking ion channels from plants and yeast and overexpressing these in order to lead to hyper sequestration of salts. They wanted to see the effects of using each channel as well as in tandem. They mentioned use of mRFP in vacuoles for colocalization of ion channels. We suggested looking at increased salt tolerance with using seawater bacteria. The Aachen team had actually concluded from literature that yeast was more effective at salt sequestration than bacteria. They integrated these parts into the genome and were trying to implement a kill switch to prevent the organism from running loose.
Team Improvement
To improve the group dynamic, Team Aachen suggested that we try to understand the team more on a personal level. They did this by hanging out together, playing video games, and cooking meals. This allowed the team members to bond with each other and understand each other to a point where they could work better together to accomplish a common goal. Also, they suggested that all new recruits must be made aware of the commitment required for iGEM, so that they could leave the team before the research process began. This would result in a smaller team at the end, but the team would have highly committed team members that would be sufficient to accomplish the goal.
Our team struggled greatly to secure sufficient fundraising to cover all costs. We did fundraising throughout the summer whereas Team Aachen tackled fundraising much earlier in the process. Our team members were assigned several companies to contact for fundraising on their own time, and this made it more difficult to ensure everyone was proactive about the fundraising effort. Team Aachen came together on the weekends and contacted companies together. They also suggested doing more research into the company’s profile and finding common ground with the company and the team’s research in order to have more success. They also recommended calling companies over the phone rather than over the email because companies were more responsive that way.
Important Lessons
- Focus on a recruitment process that encourages members to understand one another.
- Ensure that each member understands the commitment of being on the team.
- Make meetings less lecture based and more engaging to members. Encourage creativity and sharing of ideas.
