National Meetup

On June 21^st 2014, a National meetup was organised in Wageningen by the BananaGuard team. The aim of the symposium was to present the projects and meet all the other Dutch teams participating in iGEM (Delft-Leiden, Eindhoven and Groningen) this year and to engineer collaborations with the National Institute for Public Health and Environment (RIVM). The representatives of RIVM presented their work and showed enthusiasm for our project and the field of synthetic biology. They invited us to attend a future RIVM policy meeting with government representatives.

The symposium started on a sunny afternoon in the Forum building, the centrepiece of Wageningen University & Research Centre. After all teams arrived and enjoyed coffee, the symposium started. Each team was given the opportunity to present their project and their progress so far. Since many people with different backgrounds were present, a broad spectrum of feedback was delivered after each presentation, giving each team more insight into the projects.

Afterwards, a BBQ took place, allowing the teams to socialise with each other. In the informal atmosphere, discussions went on about the iGEM projects, but also about synthetic biology in general, the working environment of each team and numerous other topics.

A few months later, we participated in a second National Meetup, organised by iGEM Groningen. Since all teams had a lot of progress, this second meetup also proved to be very helpful and informative.