Team:SDU-Denmark/Collaborations

Collaboration

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much"

The American author Helen Keller had it right! As an iGEM team, you can reach many goals, but as an entire community, we can aspire to achieve so much more. Thanks to all the people that made this iGEM experience so memorable, we truly enjoyed your companionship!

Danish ethics and wiki workshop at SDU

In the spirit of the iGEM community, we hosted a meetup in August for our fellow Danish iGEM teams: InCell from the University of Copenhagen (KU), and the Snakebite Detectives from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). A total of seven members from these two teams joined us for breakfast and attended our meetup. This was the first ever iGEM meetup hosted by our university, so we decided to make it memorable. We decided to take advantage of our interdisciplinary team roster, and designed a wiki and ethics workshop to aid our fellow Danish teams.
We utilised the broad interdisciplinary profile of our team, to have Emil S. and Lene present the perception of science throughout the history and the bioethical aspects of GMO, respectively. Emil S. has a Bachelor of Arts in History, and Lene has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. The ethical presentation was purposely turned into an ethical debate, where viewpoints of ethical conduct were exchanged and discussed. After the presentations and discussions on bioethics, it was time for the wiki workshop.
The SDU-Denmark iGEM teams have won the Best Wiki prize several times in the past. As such, we wanted to share the knowledge gained from our university's past. To facilitate this exchange of knowledge on wiki development, we recruited our current supervisor Thøger Jensen Krogh, to hold presentations on how to design a good wiki. He was qualified for this task through his role as the designer of the SDU iGEM 2013 and 2014 team wikis, which won the special prize on both occasions. During the presentation, Thøger had arranged several exercises where the attendees got to mingle, discuss and evaluate their wikis. This resulted in a steady flow of information and constructive feedback between all three teams.
After a long day of learning and discussing, we went for a tour around campus under the summer sun, which concluded in a visit to the roof terrace of the campus dormitory, followed by dinner. It was requested, by our fellow Danish teams, to make the SDU meetup a tradition. They suggested for all of us to meet again closer to the wiki deadline, to evaluate each team’s progress.

Attending meetups

Besides hosting our own meetup, we also attended several ones during our iGEM experience. The first of which, was the 5th Annual Biobrick Workshop in March, hosted by the Technical University of Denmark. This meetup not only gave us our first experience with Biobricks, but also worked as a foundation for friendships across the teams.
Our second meetup, the Nordic iGEM Conference, was hosted by the University of Copenhagen in June. The main focus of this meetup, was the traditional mini Jamboree. Participating in this gave us useful feedback from the judges, as well as from our fellow iGEM teams. This helped us greatly shape and develop our project for the better.
To celebrate the beginning of our iGEM summer, we went on a road trip to attend the European Meetup, hosted by the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Here we discussed ideas regarding our project at a poster session, learned from all the other great iGEM projects, and made new friends from all over Europe.

Further collaboration

In our project, we have been in contact with the iGEM teams from Bielefeld and Imperial College, who helped us by sending crucial parts relevant to the execution of our project.
As our project revolves around global warming and green sustainable energy, we were thrilled to hear about the iGEM Goes Green initiative from the TU Dresden iGEM team. Following their guidelines, we have calculated the carbon footprint of our laboratory work and travelling. We have, in part, tried to make up for our carbon footprint, by changing our travelling and eating habits in our everyday lives. Furthermore, we have reduced our daily electricity consumption, our wiki became CO₂ neutral and we made an effort to sort our waste. The full report can be scrutinized here.
We sought expertise from the Macquarie iGEM team, who has worked with the implementation of photosynthesis in E. coli since 2013. We had an interesting Skype call with their team, where we discussed the particular challenges the previous teams had experienced throughout their projects. During the skype conversation, we realised, that they could benefit from our knowledge on the electron transport pathways, that we used for our project.
We were also able to help the Stony Brook iGEM team by facilitating communication with members of the SDU iGEM team from 2016. Shortly after the European meetup, we received an email from the Cologne-Düsseldorf iGEM team regarding a postcard campaign, which we gave some feedback on.
During our project we received several questionnaires from fellow teams. We were delighted to help the teams by answering their questionnaires. The questionnaires were from:

Waterloo - regarding 3D printing of lab equipment
Dalhousie - regarding the common conception of science literature
University of Washington - regarding communication platforms used by teams
Vilnius-Lithuania - regarding cotransformation
Nanjing-China - regarding whole-cell sensor for formaldehyde
University of Sydney - regarding the use and accessibility of insulin
Georgia State - regarding disabilities
Greece - regarding modular RNAi-based logic circuits