Team:Amazonas Brazil/Achievements/Prizes
Software
The iProGRAm (iGEM Protocol Git Repository from Amazonas_Brazil) was developed to provide an open platform to expand the iGEM experience through creating, storing, sharing and discussing lab protocols. We believe that in a collaborative environment we would move one step forward to SynBio advancement, reducing the ad hoc experiment design and increasing the team's connection. We were inspired by the open software practices that brought GitHub to life and have made a tremendous impact on the development of software engineering. We hope that iProGRAm can be ourProGRAm, and has real impact to iGEMers from around the world. We acknowledge that there are many software tools developed to store protocols, but our standout point is the decoupling our platform, the iProGRAm, from our database. For that we created the AlexAPI, just like it’s inspirational name, the Alexandria Library, is an open source API to access our protocol database, independently of any web application. Read more
Applied Design
Once Thomas Knight said, “the engineering of biology remains complex because we have never made it simple”. Although revolutionary, the current CRISPR/Cas9 techniques have gaps and a weak foundation on SynBio principles. How to make it easier and expand the growth? In the past years, the bioengineering community has transformed biology acknowledging the concept of standards, which made real the reliable use of interchangeable parts. Relying on such principles, CRISPeasy is a BioBrick toolbox that has come to highlight these concepts. CRISPeasy can be applied as your standard toolbox for genome engineering, providing a reliable method to: design your optimized guide-RNA, assemble a Donor DNA with RFC10 compatibility and easily insert your BioBrick into E. coli genome. Abstract your work AND be engaged to a better future, constructing genome engineered machine to solve real-world problems. One standard at a time. Easy as A-B-C... using CRISPeasy toolbox. Read more
Integrated Human Practices
As iGEMers, we believe in the power of the SynBio community. To build our CRISPeasy toolbox, we founded our project’s design grounded in several collaborations, bringing up the challenges that iGEM teams had faced through the path of achieving their goals. Contacting teams around the world, we raised the lack of standardization, the difficulty to build and assemble devices as the major bottlenecks of CRISPR-based projects. Analysing the development of projects throughout iGEM history and the themes approached, we built our project with the perspective to overcome the raised obstacles. Besides, we unified the firsts researchers working with CRISPR in Brazil and integrated their experience into our design, aiming to expand this revolutionary technique in Latin America. Going one step forward, we proposed a framework to further facilitate CRISPR projects engineering. Read more
Education and Public Engagement
We directed our framework into different approaches. For iGEM community, we conducted a study to understand which and how factors can influence a team’s performance. By applying machine learning, we evidenced that factors such as the socioeconomic indicators of a certain country are related to how successful its respective iGEM team is. For our community, we addressed the bureaucratic issues that hamper importing biological parts in our country, by meeting with Brazil’s Regulatory Agency representatives and developing a guideline to aid researchers. We also kept promoting SynBio in the heart of the Amazon, by giving lectures, workshops and producing educational videos. Finally, for 2017's Giant Jamboree, we designed a poster in augmented reality; this is a novel approach on iGEM, integrating the viewers to our project through a deeper experience. Read more
