Collaborations

In the spirit of the collaborative scientific method, the UT Austin team has reached out to several other teams. Through this outreach to the iGEM teams of Texas, we began working with the Texas Tech team. This being Texas Tech's first year competing, their team had many questions and concerns for the competition that were brought up when plans for collusion between the two teams was discussed.

Over the course of three months, the Tech team has visited Austin three times. The first, was a meeting between two leader representatives where the teams’ initial projects were discussed. This original meetup occurred due to the teams’ plan to collaborate with each other. Tech was to prove that the gellan gum plates project by Jenna McGuffey could be reproduced. UT was to prove an assay produced by Tech could be reproduced. Many questions were fielded by the UT representative, such as what terms in iGEM meant and what the classifications for qualifiers were, so contacts were exchanged so that any further questions provided by the first-year team could be answered, as well as for future correspondence regarding the reproducibility of each teams projects. The second meetup was when a representative from the Tech team visited Austin for the safe and legal exchange fluorescent bacteria from UT to Tech for a workshop that Tech would be giving. During this meeting more questions were answered. At the third meetup occurring at the symposium, the sphingomonas needed to make gellan gum plates were given to Tech, and questions were again fielded regarding deadlines, trip details, medal determinants, and wiki requirements. While UT did not receive an assay from Tech, UT did collaborate with this first year team and aided in the team’s end goal of being a competitive team at the iGEM Jamboree.

Furthermore, the Tech team team has proven a project that Jenna McGuffey, a member of the iGEM team is working on: agar plates made from sphingamonas.

At the University of Texas, Natural Science’s Research Symposium, a Texas iGEM meetup was conducted. Texas Tech and Rice both sent representatives to present, at the research symposium, their scientific results of current experiments being conducted in lab. Separate from the symposium, together, each of the three teams after the initial presentation of their research, shared their current iGEM results. During this collaborative discussion, each team shared their perspective on the other’s project, whether this was constructive criticism for the order of presentation or whether a slide could be elaborated or praise for a new idea entering the world of synthetic biology. This meetup came to fruition via communications over email, phone, and facebook. Multiple members of each team worked together to reach out to the other team so that this final meeting could be possible.