The main idea of iGEM is an easy way of biological engineering realized by standard biological parts (BioBricks) and an open source database. These make synthetic biology accessible to everyone. The whole concept of BioBricks is based on sharing parts freely across the community. The collaboration of all teams is one important feature of iGEM in order to help other teams realizing before the end of the competition. The community connects different iGEM teams to help each other, learn from each other and finally to achieve their desired goals. The collaboration of individual teams is one of the most important aspects in iGEM.
For our iGEM project we collaborated with several other iGEM teams. We collaborated extensively with the iGEM team Unifi 2017 and CU Boulder 2017. Team Unifi participates for the first time in the iGEM competition and our aim was to help them getting jump started into the iGEM competition and coaching them in order to direct them towards a successful project. iGEM Unifi helped us with the characterization of the transporter ptNTT2, because of their more precise equipment in recording growth rates. Next to this collaboration we sent plasmids from former iGEM Bielefeld-CeBiTec Teams to iGEM SDU Denmark and to several other researchers worldwide .
