Why does China have more teams? How does the United States get to win more medals over the years? Why Africa only has two registered teams? Why there’s no team from Central America in the competition?

iGEM teams are broadly distributed all around Earth. Geographical location, culture, and economy are some factors which impact directly on participation and performance of teams from the biggest competition of synthetic biology in the world. All over these 15 years of iGEM, many teams started these journey, grew bigger and became a reference to other iGEMers, due to extraordinary projects developed in the lab or social work engaged directly to the community.

And how to know or predict which factor can influence directly one team on being successful and achieve medals? To answer this, we united knowledge in Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition. By identifying patterns present on iGEM teams it’s possible to predict which factors really affect directly the prizes they win and the medals they achieve.

The idea arose from our curiosity to see if there was any correlation between winners of the iGEM medal and its continent of origin, since the first international edition, 2005. From each team, we collected name, the country they belong to, continent and medals won by year. We also identified and correlated geographically “Grand Prize” winners. In this query, we considered a large specter, identifying how many and which were the medals winner per year; compiling all data in algorithmic scales, which gave us pattern of recognition of what makes a winning team.

During the data query, we noticed that not everything was organized and disposed of in the same places, and it lead us to conclude that iGEM data are constantly being transformed and structured. In this step, a great came from iGEM Foundation, providing data by “iGEM Meta”. Therefore, the data that could be better analyzed and understood are from 2014 on, our starting point. Finally, we divided teams according to their countries’ respective continents.

Data analysis

To complement the data we obtained, we also performed an analysis based on Machine Learning methods and Pattern Recognition. Then, we added to it data from iGEMeta and some informations from the World Bank database and attributed weight to these data:

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Infogram

Future impacts

Many variables could’ve been utilized to perform patterns recognition. However, some websites don’t have recent data about their countries, difficulting the choice of variables. Students from all around the world have an enormous potential in elaborating strategical solutions to problems in their communities through synthetic biology. However, not every continent has an expressive amount of teams as, for example, Africa, Central and South America. In these places, talented students have to face struggles as general socioeconomic issues and lack of investment in education, science, and technology, which difficult the journey of their teams to the Giant Jamboree.

One of the most important milestones for an iGEM team is when the biological parts kit arrives. It is a long way from Boston for every team around the world to receive their packages. How much time did we lose waiting for ours to arrive instead of doing lab work?

Even then, why and how did this happen?

For the kits to finally get to our hands, they must go through scrutiny and analysis by the Brazilian Regulatory Importing Agency, and, only upon lengthy inspection, they are finally cleared to their final destinations. That, of course, considering everything goes well.

However, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (scientist’s very own Murphy’s Law), things can derail quite quickly. As the kits may get entrenched in the entropy of trade legislation, the material may be returned to the sender, be lost midway or, most simply, be denied shipping fulfillment due to biosafety issues. Considering the kit survives this internal process, it can take a good few months of waiting time and unnecessary anxiety.

This long and inefficient process - unknown by many iGEMers – was addressed by our team. We longed to understand the importing and exporting policies for biological parts in Brazil, and worked alongside ANVISA (the Brazilian Agency responsible for regulating the traffic of these materials), to find ways to solve this problem.

How we did it

The National Agency For Sanitary Surveillance (ANVISA in Portuguese) is the federal entity that inspects and regulates Food, Drugs, and other products potentially harmful products (analogous to the FDA in the United States), being responsible for devising the policies and norms regarding biological material distribution throughout the country.

We studied the Brazilian legislation, focusing on the procedures regarding importing of nucleic acids and proteins. We collaborated with experts in this area who clarified us about the legal aspect of it and concluded that there is no specific laws concerning importing and exporting of biological parts in Brazil.

Aiming to map the obstacles, we developed a survey and sent it to many research groups and laboratories in Brazil, with questions regarding the waiting time, the accessibility of the legislation and beyond.

Finally, to draw a comparison between different international settings, we also sent the same forms to iGEMers abroad.

What we found

While studying the normative laws, we realized that there aren’t specific laws for biological parts – nucleic acids and proteins. Generally, in Brazil, the approval or confiscation of biological material is decided on the inspector’s interpretation of the case. Beyond this bibliographical research, the analysis of the forms and comparison of the responses from Brazilian and International perspectives revealed some alarming bureaucratic questions.

The lack of specific legislation governing biological parts would give the scientific community the security and legal support to import these materials, vastly reducing the amount of time necessary to access these components. We then met with the ANVISA representatives once more to discuss what could be done in the legislative sphere and presented suggestions for the importing process of biological materials.

Data analysis

Our sample consisted of 29 surveys from Brazil and 15 from iGEM teams worldwide. There were six questions in the study and, after comparing both groups, we observed exciting trends.

Next steps

As iGEMers, after verifying the disparity of answers, we decided to bring to ANVISA our necessity to make the entry and exit of biological material less bureaucratic and more efficient, allowing Brazilian scientists to have practicality and allow open discussion about how these problems negatively influence the national scientific development efforts. We reunited with regional representatives and established that current laws regarding the subject are limited to the human genetic material (body fluids, cells, tissues, blood, organs). Thus, alongside them, we demanded ANVISA what could be done to address this lack of specific policy for biological parts and urged for them to regulate it. Going further, we also developed a guideline to aid researchers to import and export biological material, validated by ANVISA as well. Click here to access the guideline.

Our Human Practices members Maria Cecília and Wlademir meeting regional representative of ANVISA (National Agency For Sanitary Surveillance) Marco Antonio Pinto to discuss the current legislation to import biological parts in Brazil.

So, in the future, iGEMers in situations like these can develop their activities in a similar fashion, promoting positive impacts in their communities and removing barriers for synthetic biology growing. As perspective, we believe that what we’ve done can help, guide and inspire fellow iGEM teams to create a more connected and integrated community, with free-to-use DNA parts; get, give and share, paving the way to make synthetic biology more and even greater.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY 101

A simple method to expand scientific knowledge

Over this season we amplified the way we promote science. Expanding our perspectives, we had decided to address the community as a whole, through simple tools, like educative videos. The videos were especially thought according to the target public, caring about appropriate language, addressed topics, examples for easy understanding and ways to make this available for the general community — including the iGEMers from all parts of the world, thanks to the use of subtitles in national languages. The themes ー"A brief introduction to synthetic biology"; "BioBrick concepts and definitions and BioBrick Foundation"; "Practical concepts and applications of CRISPR technology"; and “the relationship between the recombination system and CRISPR/Cas9" ー allowed us to establish a collaboration with Tübingen Team, and we provide them videos to its online channel.

Beyond that, we participated in the world's biggest technology meeting: Campus Party. Which took place in our country’s capital - Brasilia. Three of us represented our team, taking synthetic biology developed in the Amazon, and the work with CRISPR/Cas9, to a national scale. We also had been present at local events, promoting lectures and workshops, like the first Academic Week of Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering, covering a wide range of subjects regarding these fields, such as health, genetics, bioprospecting Amazon’s biodiversity and, of course, Synthetic Biology.

Finally, as restless iGEMers, we decided to spread the word of synthetic biology in a different manner. As projects communication is a fundamental part of IGEM, we thought a new way to promote the forthcoming between project-public: Augmented reality (AP), which integrates the real world to fictitious images created by the used dispositive. The great part from this is: this tool might bring an attractive visual, and, if well-used, an excellent way to simplify presentations or simulate phenomena without its occurrence in real world.

Using Augmented reality technology we aim to turn the banner interactive, with animated images, to allow the public easy understanding, further the usual and limited current physical methods. Encouraging teams around the globe to make part of an open community to share educational and knowledge values.