Collaborations

Texas Tech Collaboration

To fulfill the gold medal requirement, the UT Austin team mentored the first year Texas Tech team.
The Texas Tech Collaboration page can be found here.

In the spirit of the collaborative scientific method, the UT Austin team 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 about the competition that were brought up when plans for collusion between the two teams were 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 made by Tech could be reproduced. Many questions were fielded by the UT representative, such as what terms in iGEM meant and what were the classification for iGEM medals. Therefore, 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.

Texas iGEM Meet Up

A Texas iGEM meetup was conducted at the University of Texas Natural Research Symposium. Representatives from both Texas Tech and Rice Universities exhibited their research and discussed the results of their current experiments. 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.

Monterrey Collaboration

The team out of Monterrey, Mexico also reached out to the UT Austin team, being their closest neighbor. UT Austin helped the Monterrey team in trouble-shooting conjugation.