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The iGEM teams within the Netherlands have put their heads together to benefit from each other’s work under the banner of “iGEM Netherlands”. The goals of the organization include hosting an iGEM primer event for the new iGEM teams by the supervisors and past iGEMers, meet-ups to amalgamate new ideas and of course exchanging thoughts and bricks. This medium intends to improve the research quality, exchange past working experiences, preaching the iGEM mantras to the beginners, feedback on the human practices and safety measures, to equip the teams with an arsenal to tackle the obstacles during the iGEM competition. The preparatory course organized by iGEM Netherlands were in sequential order starting with the general introduction of iGEM and how it played a significant role in promoting synthetic biology. Advanced cloning strategies were introduced and were explained in details. Workshops were organized to help other iGEM team members to become familiar with the computational analysis, modelling(mathlab), oscillation circuit and toggle switches simulation. Aside from these educational activities, another important aspect in iGEM is to get to know each other, forming a network between team members to help each other out during and outside of iGEM, e.g.; a gathering had been organized for all Dutch iGEM teams for presenting their work,exchanging feedbacks and close it with a nice BBQ. iGEM Netherlands is the first of its kind where a collaborative effort has been established on a national scale within the context of iGEM. This has been very beneficial in propelling our projects towards success with the knowledge that we have gained during the preparatory courses and activies that have been organized. This type of collaboration would be beneficial to other iGEM teams as well, should they choose to do so.

The iGEM team of Cornell is one of the iGEM teams that is, as well as we are, working on a fungus. They are working on basidiomycetes and are making a toolkit for this unknown chassis. For the collaboration between iGEM Cornell and us we exchanged biobricks. This would be a pki promoter and terminator from our site and we got a cre-recombinase and two resistance genes (geneticin and hygomycin) from them to be tested in A. niger. For the geneticin resistance markers A. niger was transformed with the construct and at different geneticin the growth of a negative control and the transformants are checked. It appeared that 60µg/mL is not enough geneticin to inhibit the growth of A. niger without the resistance gene. Another growth experience was done with a concentration of 220µg/mL.