YSB 2.0

We participated in the second YSB conference sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and UCL. It was a great opportunity to meet up with some of the British teams and SDU-Denmark as well as make some new friends. All the teams presented the progress of their projects so far as well as displaying a poster. It was excellent practice for Boston, given that there are no Regionals this year.

UCLA - Manufacturing Biomaterials

Just after we decided on our project, we stumbled upon UCLA’s iGEM website. We discovered that they were also working on exciting biomaterials. For them, it was spider silk production and functionalisation, in much the same fashion as our work with cellulose. Despite the differences in our chosen material building blocks, our overall goals were similar. Thus, a collaboration was only natural.

As part of our collaboration we wanted to bring all the iGEM teams a bit closer together. We invited them all to join reddit.com/r/igem a place where all the teams can discuss openly about aspects of their projects and the competition in general. We hope that it will provide a communication platform not only for the competing teams, but also for people that seek to participate in iGEM in the future.

Stanford-Brown-Spelman

Social media brought us to our second collaborator. After seeing a picture of our raw bacterial cellulose posted on Twitter, the Stanford-Brown-Spelman (SBS) iGEM team approached us. Our email exchange led to a fruitful Skype meeting and the exchange of protocols for cellulose growth and processing.

Both of our teams are working on bacterial cellulose, but at the same time we are participating in different tracks and have completely different approach on applications. While we are looking into water filtration, SBS is looking into building biosynthetic Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

Edinburgh

We helped Edinburgh iGEM with their policy and practices project through a short Skype meeting about our team structure and dynamics.