Team:UiOslo Norway/Collaborations
Collaborations
BioBrick tutorial, Danish Technical University
The 10th-12th of March 2017, the iGEM-team from DTU arranged the BioBrick Tutorial for the Scandinavian teams, with the intention of lecturing the different teams on the BioBrick-standard, assembly of biological systems, coaching in techniques for presentation and project pitching, as well as socializing and networking. We had a delegation of three team members join for this conference; from this we were able to teach the basics of biobrick-assembly to team members with no background in bioscience, practice presentation techniques, and go to know friends and future collaborators from the different Scandinavian teams.Online ethics Discussion, Uppsala
iGEM Uppsala organized a set of online discussions on the topic of synthetic biology and bioengineering between several different teams. On the 11th of August 2017, two members of our team participated in one such discussionon the topics of uncontrolled release of our biological system as well as potential misuse of our project. Along with the other teams, we attempted to answer those questions to the best of our ability, and it was refreshing and interesting to hear the thoughts of other teams with different projects on the subjectsCollaboration with NTNU
There are two iGEM-teams in Norway; UiO and NTNU. Because of this, it is quite natural for us to be collaborating and communicating together, and on the 1st-3rd of September, we traveled to Trondheim to meet the other team. This meet-up had three main purposes: networking, setting up a future laboratory collaboration between the teams, and holding mock presentations for both teams and be able to get feedback. As one of the main supervisors of the NTNU iGEM team is a former iGEM judge, both teams were able to get solid feedback on the contents, structure and technique of their oral presentations. There was also socialization and an agreement to collaborate on the labwork further. Overall a great weekend!As a laboratory collaboration, we tested two of the plasmids in the system NTNU used; pLA230 and MP6 (BBa_K2265000), as part of our laboratory collaboration. Protocol and results can be found on our lab page; background information on said plasmids is readily available on the NTNU team wiki.
Hefei University of Technology - The BioOrganizer
The iGEM-team from Heifei University of Technology is doing a software project called the BioDesigner, made with the purpose of making BioBrick information more accessible through improved searching and documentation. As we had previously written a script with a similar purpose, we can definitely see the value of such a project. They were surveying what sort of functionality other teams would be interested in having in such software; we gave feedback on what we'd like to see, as well as asking how feasible those implementations would be as not all the information we'd be interested in would necessarily be easily collectable from the iGEM webpages. We also actively tested the software and provided feedback on functionality, design, and things we thought were lacking and unnecessary.TNCR Korea
At the very end of the competition, TNCR Korea's iGEM team asked us to fill in a questionnaire on gluten and if both teams would be interested in giving feedback to each others wiki pages. This was done, and both teams got useful feedback that they were able to put into practice.