Collaborations with institutions or other iGEM Teams promote exchange of experiences and know-how and lead to a benefit for both sites. Therefore, we got in contact with two local research institutions. They supported us with advice, materials and helpful methods for our experiments. One of the supporters was the Thünen Institute in Braunschweig with a research focus on economy, ecology and technologies of rural regions, seas and forests. Dr. Ulf Prüße, an expert for renewables conversion technology, gave us professional advice for our experiments with beads and biofiltration. Furthermore we received lots of material from the institute and had the possibility to measure the methane degradation at their gas chromatograph with a thermal conductivity detector.
An important part of the iGEM competition is the cooperation between the teams. In order to get in contact with other iGEM Teams from Germany, we joined the iGEM Meet Ups in Munich and Aachen. We numerously represented the iGEM Team Braunschweig at both events and drew attention to our this year’s project. We used these opportunities to give presentations and obtained encouraging feedback and helpful ideas during the follow-up discussions. At the Munich meet-up we made contact with the iGEM teams from Aachen and Hanover, followed by some nice barbecue evenings with the team from Hanover. We also met a few iGEMers from Aachen at the “Maker Faire” in Hanover and spent the day together. Team Aachen provided us with a self-engineered methane sensor which we would later put to good use in our experiments. Such collaborations were strengthened at the second meet-up which was held in Aachen in September. However, we did not only get in contact with teams nearby, but also with teams overseas. We had a skype video chat with the iGEM Team Waterloo and discussed our projects, and exchanged our experiences concerning the competition. The iGEM Team from Virginia created a survey about synthetic biology which was also to be conducted by teams from other parts of the world. Therefore, we translated the survey into German and conducted it at our university’s open house. The survey dealt with the public awareness towards and acceptance of synthetic biology and the aim was to get an impression of how people from all ages, origins and profession think about this. We do not know the results yet, but we still hope we could make a contribution for this survey to become more representative with regard to the control sample.