Science is no longer an individual and isolated work, but has transformed profoundly. It’s now teams and collaborations that drive high-impact science. Therefore we tried to connect with other teams who participate in iGEM competitions during our work. This led us to interviews and skype meetings, which resulted in formation of both friendship and professional bonds across the world. With synthetic biology being a quite specific area of expertise one who deals with it can sometimes feel quite isolated, so it was incredibly exciting for us to be able to meet other young people with the same love and passion for science as our own, whom we hardly wait to meet in Boston.

We consider collaboration or providing helpful information a very important part of this project and science in general. It is the base for future project even beyond iGEM.

We had skype meetings with many teams, but would specifically like to point out some of that we were particularly fond of.

We talked to iGEM Team Graz (1) and shared with each other our concerns and project development as well as tackling practical problems which occur after spending a lot of time in the lab. We talked about different methods and protocols each one of us is using and how those could be improved. We each made some suggestions to the other team in terms of what else they could try to implement in their work. The project team Graz, whose project idea is bacterial evolution and finding new selection markers, was, at the time, dealing with slow or even nonexistent bacterial growth in liquid media. Based on our experience we made some suggestions, such as testing different concentration of antibiotic. We also suggested they might do some mathematical modeling to predict the outcome of their bacterial fights and thus improve their project. They helped us with suggestions on how to handle our bacteria, which we use for plasmid multiplication, even thought we work on mammalian cells in general.

Furthermore we participated in surveys for other teams, notably for iGEMnews , News from EPFL iGEM team which was a fun way to share our project with the community. We were interviewed , about our team and project which we found to be and entertaining way to connect iGEM teams and make us read about each other.

We also made a physical contribution to another teams’ project.

Team München iGEM was in need for a working kill switch, so they contacted our team to ask us for BBa_K782063, a part used by team Slovenia 2012 and not yet available in the distribution. The Slovenian team this year is of course composed of different members, but we had to search for the part in the collection of the National Institute of Chemistry and prepare it. In order to make sure the part was correct, we also did a control restriction and sent it for sequencing before sending the part to the München team. They additionally characterized the part BBa_K782063 and made some excellent improvements, for which we thank them.