Team:METU HS Ankara/Collaborations
ITU iGEM Team Part Collaboration
We had a Skype call with ITU iGEM team. We discussed about arranging a meetup, part characterization and about helping each other. They characterized our 2A peptide-sequenced trial part and they made 3D simulation of FimH protein. And we helped them with restriction ligation and cloning of their part, K2141002. We used pET28a(+) as a vector. Furthermore, we helped them with plasmid purification. Members of the team came to Ankara from İstanbul, and we had a meetup at 29th of August to exchange parts, and we had a fun time together.
International iGEM Protocols
This year, we wanted to translate the iGEM lab protocols into different languages in order to make them more understandable and easy to apply at lab. Therefore, we collaborated with the teams : XMU China , INSA Lyon , LMU & TU Munich , Tokyo Tech , Toulouse , TU Eindhoven, Groningen and asked them to translate specific lab protocols into their native language. They returned and we achieved our goal.
Our second aim was to enable the lab protocols more understandable for new or other iGEM teams as it would be a lot easier to understand and apply protocols in their native language rather than English.
At the end of our collaboration , we received iGEM lab protocols translated in French, German , Chinese , Japanese , Turkish and Dutch. We hope our cooperation can help other iGEM teams with their work ; Also we would like to thank each team to collaborate with us, it was an incredible experience.
Improving Harvard Bio Design 2015 iGEM Team Part
This year we decided to use FimH because of it’s ability to bind to the human epithelial cells which was used by HarvardBioDesign last year. FimH binds naturally to the mannose sugar that is found on the surfaces of eukaryotic cells. Because of this ability it can also bind to the healthy cells so we started to work on a more specific binding to target only cancer cells. We used RPMrel like HKUST Hong Kong iGEM Team to target specifically cancer cells and used their experiences to improve our project . Also we choosed to use the arabinose promoter which Team Harvard Biodesign used in their 2015 project.
iGEM survey in an international context
As an another collaboration we prepared an online survey to see what people know about colon cancer. Some of the iGEM teams as iGEM XMU- China shared our survey on their social accounts and helped us to reach more people . This event showed us that not only people in Turkey but also all around the world people do not know much about colon cancer and it’s treatments . So we decided to do human practices on giving information about colon cancer.
Spreading Survey of the Aachen Team
We collaborated with Aachen 2016 iGEM Team in Order to disseminate their survey. With Aachen team's survey we collected information about different countries' point of view to genetic engineering and compared them. We are interested in how much people know about genetic engineering and how they inform themselves. They want to compare the knowledge and the experience about genetic engineering in different countries.This is the reason why we collaborated with Aachen Team and other teams for the survey.
Reflection
Our iGEM journey gave us many opportunities. One of them was to contact with order teams from all over the world and collaborate with them in order to share ideas and knowledge about many different subjects. We utilised previous projects and made them useful for our work. Furthermore, we had a chance to get opinions and feedbacks from different perspectives. It was a great pleasure for our team to collaborate with other iGEM members.
