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Team:Sheffield/collaboration
From 2014.igem.org
COLLABORATION
MEET UPS
During the course of the project we formed collaborative links with a number of different iGEM teams to further integrate Sheffield into the iGEM community and establish potential associations for future iGEM teams from Sheffield. We attended the Oxford iGEM Meet Up on Thursday, 19th June 2014 to meet with other iGEM teams from the UK and Ireland. This was a great day with interesting talks from guest speakers giving us insight into the project. Over a poster session we established links with other iGEM teams with whom we later collaborated. As it was early on in the project timeline, it was useful to see where projects were heading and also the variety of issues being tackled using synthetic biology.
We hosted our own meet up on Friday, 18th July 2014, a month after the previous meet up. We felt that this would be a great time for us to solidify and identify specific areas and ideas on which we could collaborate with other teams, as other teams had started their lab work by this point. We met with the teams from Kent, Norwich-UEA, Oxford and York. Firstly, we had presentations from two guest speakers from the University of Sheffield: Professor Phillip C. Wright (link to bio on team page) (Head of Chemical and Biological Engineering) who spoke about the development of synthetic biology from an engineering perspective, and Robert Meckin (Doctoral Researcher, Science and Technology Studies) who gave an insight into human practices surrounding synthetic biology. An networking activity involving human bingo allowed us to find out more about each other before a poster session and followed by a more relaxed evening on the town. We had a great time hosting the teams and hope they did too! Below is a video to show a summary of the events that took place:
Edinburgh
During the course of the project we established contact and collaborative links with a number of different iGEM teams. For instance, with Team Edinburgh we were in touch regarding Human Practices. During skype meetings we discussed our HP project approaches and decided there how our inter-team collaboration would work. Team sheffield was interviewed by team edinburgh over a skype call regarding task management and role distribution within a team. On the other hand, we asked some questions about the different components of their HP work, so that we could incorporate them in the SocioBrick Registry of standard parts that we developed for iGEM. We considered the collaboration successful in that each team was able to get the necessary data from each other to carry on their individual work. We then had a chance to personally meet some members of team Edinburgh in the Young Synthetic Biology Conference in London which was a wonderful further learn about the work they had been invested in as a whole.
Oxford
The Oxford iGEM Team were one of the first teams we established collaborative links with after the meet-up they held in Oxford. When we held our own meet-up in Sheffield, our teams agreed that there was an overlap in the aims of our project
Team Oxford were one of the first teams we established collaborative links with. After the University of Sheffield Meet-up organised by us, our teams felt their was an overlap in the way our teams worked and what we were addressing and therefore decided that if needed there were certain identified that we could definitely collaborate in. For instance in the beginning of the project our team was having trouble obtaining successful transformations of a certain promoter that we require and so asked if Oxford could try transforming it and see if they encountered the same problem. Oxford were very helpful and happy to do it. However, while this was taking place, our team troubleshooted what the problem had been.
Further down the line, Oxford started developing a stochastic modelling system. With that, they asked if we would be interested in giving them some info regarding the promoters we were testing with our lipase and copy number which we did to allow them to further improve their model.
Paris Bettencourt
The Paris Bettencourt iGEM team was a team we collaborated with in their efforts to build a synthetic biology community for iGEM teams. We have participated in their fortnightly newsletter with a sizeable number of other iGEM teams from around the world, updating the participating teams with our progress so far and answering the questions asked by other teams. The newsletter was particularly successful and helped the Sheffield team integrate into the iGEM community. Our entries are shown below:
We also participated in the development of Paris Bettencourt’s MOOC (Massively Open Online Course), run on Genius online knowledge base website, on which we annotated some of the entries and hope to continue to edit in future.
Valencia_UPV
To assess how good the Lab Notation we had developed was, we reached out to Team Valencia and asked if they would be interested in testing the notation for us according to the specific procedure we sent them. They were sent the notation key and 2 protocols written in the standardized lab notation format. The titles of the protocols were not included in this pack to ensure that the volunteers were only using the information provided to them. They were then asked to fill in a qualitative review assessing how they had found carrying out each of the protocols ( click here to see form). (link to the notation report). The information obtained in the review and Team Valencia’s suggestions were very beneficial for the final correction and testing the the new notation we developed.
