Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/hp collaborations

Objective: Collaborate with other iGEM teams and share information, knowledge and experiences, so we can receive new points of view and also help more iGEM competitors.

GenetiX_Tec_CCM

On Monday June the 2nd we had a videoconference with “GenetiX_Tec_CCM” team, from “Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Ciudad de México” high school. At the beginning, they were contacting one of our teammates and they asked if we could make a Skype Call, we of course accepted and scheduled it when both teams could concur. As we are both Mexican teams, we decided to help each other, also as a symbol of the national help between its habitants.

On the videoconference both teams talked about how our projects were developing, if we had any problem with the BioBricks or tools needed for the project. We also talked about general information from our teams, like the number of members, how old we are, how we started in the iGEM Competition, and more.

We also had an exchange of information about our projects and it was very interesting to know in what are they working on, how they did it or if they received some kind of capacitation or help from their institution, also telling them how these situations were in our team.

This was a great experience for us; to talk to other students with the same age as us, which are working in their own project as we are doing in ours and share our great iGEM experience.

UCL_London

On Monday June the 9th, we had a Skype videoconference with the “Team:UCL” from London. At first, we scheduled the conference to discuss things about the usage of the IrrE gene. The conversation was about our project, but they also explained their project to us. It was very interesting listening to their project, and how they were developing it; their project was about removing ammonia from water and they were using the IrrE gene to give resistance to the bacteria and a kill switch to avoid uncontrolled spreading. We also spoke about the sponsors they have, and how many team members they were and vice-versa. The team offered us to sequence some pieces, unluckily; we had already sequenced everything that had to be sequenced.

The collaboration ended up to be actually very nice and friendly, sharing our opinions about each other’s projects and talking about the teams was a great experience.

EVRY France

On Wednesday June the 11th, we shared a videoconference with the “Team: EVRY-Genople” from the college category, in order to continue with our teams collaboration activity. The reunion was scheduled from 12:00 to 12:40, in which we shared our projects and ideas, in order to improve them.

In this conference we found out that both projects were very similar, because both worked in saline environments. Their project was about modifying sponges to absorb certain substances in a marine environment, and the piece that we were using for the resistance module: IrrE, would be very helpful in their further project development. In order to continue with this collaboration, we agreed to send the necessary information of our working genes when the experimentation was over.

This conference was very rich in content, because is the first time in which we are able to be helpful to another team, besides we met different people, which was a great experience too, like the previous ones.