Team:Tokyo Tech/Collaboration

We achieved some projects that collaborated on with teams in Japan. Each team in Japan discusses with other teams regularly and actively, using Skype and Wiki on the Web. These collaborations enabled every team to share information of all teams in Japan and activate one another.

iGEM Summer Meetup in Japan (in Kyoto)

6 teams in Japan met in Kyoto University in order to practice presentation in English. On 18th August 2010, teams in Japan gathered together in “Summer meetup”. This year, the meeting was took place at Kyoto University (Hosted by team Kyoto). The aim of this meetup was to cultivate ideas with other teams. Each team was supposed to give a presentation on their projects followed by discussion with other teams. 5 teams attended to make presentations (Kyoto、UT-Tokyo、Tokyo-Metropolitan、Osaka、KIT-Kyoto), and Tokyo-tech, delegated an observer. After the presentation meeting, we had a social party and made the bond with between teams tight.

iGEM Summer Meetup in Tokyo

On 23th August 2010, 5teams near Tokyo met in our campus. This meetup was hosted by UT-Tokyo and its aim was to have a direct discussion and see our facilities. At first in the meeting, attendants were divided in four small groups, in which members from each team explained their projects and discussed together. Moreover, on the very day, two members of iGEM2009 Cambridge (Caitlin Cockerton et al.) came and discussed about project management.

Science cafe at MIRAIKAN,Tokyo

We participated in science café held at National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation [http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/ (http://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/)] on 11th, Oct. Science café is a party opened for ordinary people to mingle with science-related people over a cup of tea.
This time, the theme was “~Artificial life and cells~the future of synthetic biology ”. Early in this year, group of scientists succeeded in synthesizing Mycoplasmic genome chemically, which made the definition of life more and more vague (Gibson et al, SCIENCE 329:52 (2010)).
We shared our views with the participants whose age ranged from 12 to over 60, and this was a nice experience. This is because we thought the field of synthetic biology become more ethically difficult, and we have to reconsider how we are going to approach toward synthetic biology.