iGEM projects greatly require teamwork. Though working together, we may acquire different ideas, learn from other teams, and improve our project. Our team works better together and solves challenges when we work on collaborative projects. This result in more creativity, effective procedures, greater achievements, and better communications. The participating teams and us can accomplish our objectives by learning from others. Having said that, we have created and carried out three collaboration initiatives, which are detailed below:

  • Collaboration Event 1: Chat With Us! Online Survey
  • Collaboration Event 2: Meeting with team HongKong-PuiChing
  • Collaboration Event 3: Better Health Meet-Up

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Chat With Us! Online Survey


Photo 1. We invited other teams to complete our survey via social media.

While we were focusing on our experiments and other outreach activities, we noticed that the use of AI chatbots had become extremely common among students, especially for written academic assignments. We wanted to know if this also happened in the world of iGEM. Therefore, we created a collaboration event named “Chat With Us!”

The collaboration project aimed to investigate how iGEM teams have used AI chatbots in their written work, such as captions on social media platforms, outreach writings on Wiki pages, and more through Google Forms. The questionnaire included a variety of questions involving the overall experience and the obstacles teams encountered when using AI chatbots. We also welcomed teams to share their twist or any insights related to it.

In the event, we have received a total of 10 submissions from teams all over the world. The submissions came from various places from Hong Kong to Oxford, Barcelona and Chennai. From the survey submissions, it was shown that while 70% of the participating teams have utilised AI chatbots in their iGEM projects for written work to be put on Wiki pages, captions and quests, almost all of them had encountered different challenges and limitations of AI chatbots like misunderstanding requests and providing responses that are either too vague or too faulty. Nonetheless, the majority of the teams believed that the use of AI chatbots and similar artificial intelligence technologies had increased their efficiency and brought convenience.

Photo 2, 3, 4 & 5. A highlight of the results from the Chat With Us! survey.

We hope that this collaboration will provide valuable insights into how AI chatbots can be used to enhance the effectiveness of written communication in iGEM projects. We would also like to give thanks to teams ASU, CSMU-Taiwan, HongKong-PuiChing, Oxford, REC-CHENNAI, UB-Barcelona, and UM-Macau (in alphabetical order) for joining this event!

Other Collaborative Events We Participated in:


  • Event 1: SynbioOUTLOUD Podcast of team Lambert-GA
  • Event 2: iGEM Map Programme of team NTHU-Taiwan
  • Event 3: Science Magazine of team Barcelona-UB
  • Event 4: Introspect of team IISER-Tirupati-India
  • Event 5: Grand Highschool Meet-Up of Team NavarraBG

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