Team:Amazonas Brazil/Notebook
OUR STORY
From an impressive idea to an impressive project.
Brainstorming: the genesis
On February 25th, we got together for our weekly meeting, after a month absorbing new team members and preparing for our season. For a good start, we had a brainstorming session, to let as many ideias as possible flow and discuss them as a group. On this day, we decided which paths we were willing to follow on our Human Practices approaches and roughly divided the tasks between the team members.
Jamboré Brazuca
On March 16th, a national meeting of brazilian iGEM teams happened in Sao Paulo: the Jamboré Brazuca (a slang for Brazilian Jamboree). The event took place at the University of Sao Paulo and, gladly, eight of our team members could participate and share a bit of our history and plans for the season. It was a great experience of exchanging information and discussing the brazilian science scenery with teams that are referece on synthetic biology in Brazil.
March for Science
On April 22nd, the world had scheduled an appointment: March for Science. Over 600 of cities around the world committed to the cause, and we marched as one to fight the dark reality we live in: lack of incentive for science, devaluation of scientists and their researches, and expense reduction on education. Our iGEM team, with the assistance of Brazilian Society for Science Progress, was the pioneer on organizing the March for Science in our city - Manaus, Amazonas. We walked almost 1 km on the city’s historic center, even the pouring rain couldn’t stop us! It was a beautiful mark for worldwide science.
Campus Party
From June 15th to 17th, we participated on the world's biggest technology meeting: Campus Party. It took place on the country’s capital - Brasilia. Three of our team members represented us, taking synthetic biology and the work on CRISPR/Cas9 developed in the Amazon to national scale.
Interviews
During the whole season season our project gathered much attention from our community. Many TV broadcast companies interviewed us, and; more than presenting our project, iGEM and Synthetic Biology; we had the chance to show that science, sometimes looking distant and even obscure, can be so fascinating and able to solve many contemporary issues.
Online meetings
August was marked to get help so we did Skype sessions video calls with experts on their respective fields. Our Human Practice members met iGEM HQ representative Ana Sifuentes, to discuss our ideas for the Human Practices and what we had done so far. Rinaldo Pereira is a pioneer scientist with CRISPR in Brazil, and he met us by Skype® to help with the construction of our vector. iGEM ambassador for Latin America Guilherme Kundlatsch also assisted to consolidate some of our ideas and helped with our online repository.
Women in Science
Women’s role in science is growing bigger and bigger. In September, some of our team girls attended a debate regarding the issues faced by women in science and shared their iGEM experience with other scientists.
I Academic Week of Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering
From October 2nd to 7th, Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) hosted the first Academic Week of Biotechnology and Bioprocess Engineering. Our team members were invited to give two lectures: “Decoding Synthetic Biology”, explaining the main concepts and emphasizing the importance of performing SynBio in the heart of the Amazon, and “What you need to know about CRISPR”, when we, as the first research group working with CRISPR in the Amazon, offered a practical approach for this cutting-edge technology.
In this Academic Week, Amazonas_Brazil also offered a workshop, called “Synthetic Biology: reprogramming the regulation of gene expression”. We introduced the viewers into general concepts of gene regulation and Synthetic Biology; such as BioBricks, prefixes and suffixes, using supplementary material from BioBuilder.
Bionorte Lectures
CRISPR sparks so much interest on the scientific community, specially in Brazil where there aren’t many groups working with it. We had the opportunity to speak to Master and Doctorate students from Bionorte Network, telling them our iGEM experience and what we are currently doing with our novel BioBrick vector for CRISPR editing.
