Team:Sydney Australia/Collaborations

Auckland University

We reached out to the Auckland team for help with editing the fonts on our wiki. This lovely font that you see on our page is all thanks to them!

Dusseldorf

This year the Cologne-Dusseldorf team expanded their postcard exchange internationally, and we were excited to take part! The aim of this campaign was to educate the wider community about synthetic biology by designing a postcard with an image relevant to synthetic biology on the front, and information about synthetic biology on the back. We designed a postcard featuring Kylie the Koala to inform the public about our project and how synthetic biology can be used help make therapeutics like insulin more accessible and affordable. We exchanged our postcards with the Cologne-Dusseldorf team and the 27 other teams who were involved, then distributed them throughout the university. Through this collaboration, we hope to get people from all over the world interested in synthetic biology and iGEM!

Chennai

We've reached out across the world and connected with our Indian friends!

Uppsala

We've reached out across the world and connected with our Swedish friends!

São Paulo State University

We got in touch with the AQA-Unesp team from São Paulo State University as soon as we learned that they were also working on insulin. Their team is working to create probiotics that secrete insulin in the gut in response to glucose levels, and we thought it would be great for our teams to share our expertise on working with insulin. Over Skype meetings, we shared ideas and issues regarding our lab work and integrated human practices, and we helped the AQA-Unesp team to use the modelling program MatLab. We also shared information about insulin prices and accessibility in Australia and Brazil, as well as transformation protocols and ideas for working with Bacillus subtilis.

Bristol University

iGEM Bristol created the iGEM Development Environment, a tool for editing the iGEM wiki locally. After learning more about the tool over Google Chat, we set it up for our team and gave the Bristol team feedback on how it worked for us. The Bristol team also helped us with our economic modelling by providing us information about insulin prices in England.

All Around the World

In order to learn more about insulin accessibility, our team sent out a survey to iGEM teams around the world, many of whom also distributed it to friends and family who were insulin-dependent. We received many responses from iGEMmers and non-iGEMmers alike globally!