Helping others

During our project we have done many things to try to be as helpful as possible to other teams. On our blog we posted a description of our [http://igem.sdu.dk/?p=288#comments Best mistakes], which resulted in a great response from other teams, who told us that they have learned from it and thereby avoided making the same mistakes. In order to further help other teams we all contributed to the Valencia's survery, and got a gold medal for helping them. To make things easier in the lab for us and for other teams we made a program for the Ti84 pocket calculator, which we posted on our wiki under Tools. The program makes it easy to calculate concentrations and volumes for making the optimal ligation mix. We have corresponded with the other Danish team DTU-Denmark and agreed to help each other by evaluating our presentations before the competition, this way getting a good sense of what we can do to optimize the communication of our project. We also emailed with team XXXX from the Netherlands and helped them solve some problems similar to those we were facing at the beginning of the project. We had learned by experience that small concentrations of DNA in the samples were causing the problem and therefore advised the team to use PCR to increase the concentration there samples to get a better result.