Team:Valencia UPV/Collaborations
Collaborations
One of the most important activities of professional
researchers is to collaborate with other teams.
Collaborations provide benefits for both teams
involved: they can test their designs, know opinions,
obtain feedback, read about other projects, have other
points of view…
In Valencia UPV team we believe that collaborations
with colleagues participating in iGEM or with companies
of the sector enrich our experience and allow us to
broaden our minds, at the same time that we help other
teams. That is the reason why we have been
collaborating with other iGEM teams at any chance we
had.
Better to give than to receive
Georgia
State team needed a control for they
transformations. As we both work with Phytobricks and
plants, we sent them a device with 35s:GFP:Tnos, for
GFP expression in plants. We also advised them on the
use of Goldenbraid standard to work with
Phytobricks.
Paris
Bettencourt team is working to remove stains with
microbes. One of their objectives is to remove wine
stains. As Spain is a country known by their wines,
they asked us for samples of grapes, leaves and soil of
vineyards, so they could search for microorganisms that
could degrade wine stains. One of our team members
lives in the region Utiel-Requena, a wine with
Certification of Origin. The samples we sent them were
from this region.
We made a program that can be used to convert from
plain text to HTML. At the beginning, the program was
made for our own use (including classes particular for
our wiki). However, speaking with other teams, we
realized that it could be useful for others and we
adapted it so it could be used for any wiki working
with Bootstrap classes. You can try the program in this
link:
TXT to HTML
Cooperation
Spain iGEM Meetup: our team organized a iGEM Meetup
with UPO-Sevilla
and UPF-CRG_Barcelona.
The
weekend with both teams promoted communication and
exchange of project ideas. The presentation sessions
served as practice presenting our project to different
people. And more importantly, we made friends!
Afterwards the Meetup, we have kept contact with
Barcelona and Sevilla teams, helping each other in any
doubt related to iGEM, Jamboree and Wiki.
XMU-China:
one year more, our team took part of the XMU-China
newsletter
In this newsletter teams get to know each other and can
start a discussion of interesting topics on Synthetic
Biology. It also allows teams to contact and start
enriching collaborations.
Tianjin:
they led a survey union with questions of each team
(Team Pasteur, Team Pittsburgh, Team Virginia and Team
NTU), so we could know opinions about our projects and
synbio in general in different places in the world,
having this way a more representative sector of
population.
Aachen:
in cooperation with iGEM teams in Mexico, Taiwan and
Israel, led by Aachen, we performed a survey of general
questions about genetic engineering. Like in the
interlab study, the aim was to generate a higher amount
of data from different countries and regions. This
helped Aachen team in their human practices
studies.
EPFL: this
team created the site igem.today, were they published
and wrote about interviews to other teams. Our team had
a Skype interview with Laussane team, which was very
well conducting and was enriching for both of us. We
were proud to be featured on their page! Read here our
interview.
Warwick:
modeling collaborations are usually advantageous for
both teams. Warwick is also working with CRISPR/Cas9
system. They sent us their Matlab program to simulate
different proteins in the same environment. We tried it
to check how it simulated the Cas9 and the gRNA in the
same environment, and compare it to our own
simulations. Our team gave them our scoring system for
gRNAs, so they could use it to choose the optimal gRNA
for their protein regulation.
Surveys
Via Facebook, Twitter or email, many surveys have
reached our team. These are the teams we helped by
distributing and answering their questions:
-
Evry:
knowledge of plastic contamination and opinion
about the use of PLA produced by bacteria as an
alternative.
- Goettingen: what we know about vitamin B12 and what is the general understanding of biotechnology and the chances seen in it.
- Groningen: how sensitive information is saved, if people trust in those methods of information storing and how they would value the use of bacteria to store their information.
- Hannover: survey about how useful would be for researchers their project, TALebots, and why it would be useful or not compared to other techniques of gene editing.
- LMU-TUM_Munich: survey about enabling factors involved in crating biotech companies from iGEM teams, taking in account the results of the team during the last Jamboree and what they did after that.
-
Paris
Saclay: test "Responsible Research and
Innovation" of our team. It aims to give a
feed-back on the projects, in order to know how
the RRI principles have been respected. We had
a beautiful badge for answering!
-
Purdue :
knowledge about methods of wastewater treatment
and acceptance of the usage of engineered
bacteria for this purpose.
- TecCEM: antibiotic resistance and awareness about this problem.
- Tianjin: knowledge about contamination.
- TU Delft: research the influence of iGEM on among other things science, education and policy, using as starting point last year competition. Our team members that participated last year in iGEM filled this survey.
- UPO Sevilla: popular opinion about GMO and GMO acceptance.
- Vilnius-Lithuania: what makes successful an iGEM team, based on result of last Jamboree.
- Virginia: about awareness and use of biocontainment in iGEM projects. We also received a fantastic badge for answering.
- XMU-China: antibiotics, antibiotic resistance and bad usage of antibiotics.
