Besides the competitive aspects of iGEM, it also provides an excellent platform for collaboration between teams. As well as attending various meetings of iGEM teams to discuss projects, our collaborative efforts involved:

A Scottish iGEM poster session
We arranged a poster session for the four Scottish iGEM teams where teams would be able to discuss their projects at a high profile science convention in Scotland. It was held at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on the 16th of October and was part of The Scottish Science Advisory Council (SSAC) event to launch their report 'Synthetic Biology: opportunities for Scotland'. This gave the teams a great chance to share their projects with some of the top synthetic biologists in the country and prepare for the Boston competition only a few weeks later.

Sharing our resources
We provided bacterial strains and plasmids to team Berlin to aid them in their magnetic bacteria project.Constructs from Dundee iGEM 2011 team’s Sphereactor were sent to Oxford iGEM for the creation of their chlorinated waste disposal system.

Completing Surveys
We answered surveys for Linköping University, Sweden on peanut allergies; Warwick University, UK on the public’s opinion on synthetic biology; ETH Zürich, Switzerland on complexity in everyday life and for University of São Paulo, Brazil on ethics in biology.

We also discussed division of labor within our team with the Edinburgh iGEM team.