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Team:UT-Tokyo/Team/Collaboration
From 2012.igem.org
Collaboration
Collaboration
Having a lot of interactions with great teams, we were able to get a lot of good experience. Valuable experience we have gained with colleagues through iGEM is as follows.
Collaboration with UT-Tokyo software team
This year, there is another team from the University of Tokyo in the software track. We used “Biobrick Search” which this team made when we searched biobricks. We gave feedback on our impressions and problems it had. This seemed to be beneficial for both our and the software team.
May festival
The UT-Tokyo team held a communication room in the university festival, the May Festival during May 19th and 20th, 2012. The contents are here. We cooperated with other teams in Japan (KAIT Japan, Tokyo-NoKoGen, Saitama) in organizing this communication room. May Festival usually attracts over 10,000 people. So, this festival is a very good opportunity to get a lot of people to learn about iGEM. More people became interested in iGEM after attending our booth. Each team put up posters about their project, and explained them to people who were interested. By co-hosting the event, we think people were realized that there are various teams in the competition, with many projects. This also led to making an opportunity to strengthen collaboration between teams in Japan.
A social event with teams from Japan
On August 13, a social event was held by teams participating in 2012 iGEM from Japan. 5 teams; Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Kyoto University, University of Tokyo (software) and our team participated. Tokyo Metropolitan University hosted. Each team presented for 40 minutes about their team projects and human practices followed by questions. There were two aims for this event. First is for Japanese teams participating in iGEM 2012 to get to know each other better. Second is to get advice on our projects during the question time. In addition to being given an opportunity to practice the presentation, we were able to spend quality time with a lively question and answer session. Also, we renewed our motivation by learning other team's projects. In particular, it was fruitful that we noticed a problem about our project and got a hint of the answer to the problem by the question-and-answer session from the other teams. An appropriate and humorous piece of advice from Dr. Kiga who has been participating in iGEM for a long time was instructive. At question and answer session, we were given a memorable phrase from someone at a team; “I wanted to research about this theme, but I couldn’t. I want UT-Tokyo team to accomplish this project.” We pledged that we will carry through our project, whether his comment was true or not. We knew that one of our projects “inhibitions of transcriptional factor” is similar to “Arg box” (BBa_K649401), which is one of Tokyo Institute of Technology’s projects last year. We requested the cooperation of Tokyo Institute of Technology, and got some parts for this purpose. On the basis of these parts, we attempted to make additional tests of Arg box, to compare the results with our version, which extends upon their method.
