Team:UC Chile/Synbio web

From 2013.igem.org

Wiki-IGEM

Spreading SynBio in Spanish

We wanted to make a thorough and easy-to-understand website for Spanish speaking people like us. This way, they can get as much information of Synthetic Biology as they need and specifically teachers can find all the material they need for spreading Synthetic Biology in their classrooms!

While working on our other Human Practice projects, we realized that little information about Synthetic Biology was available in Spanish, our native language. Many of the professors attending our High School teachers-Frontiers of Biology Seminar or students from the Schools HP mentioned that they would like to learn about this new concept in an easy and simple way and they would be thankful if we could show them this new discipline in a technological application, like a web page. Moreover they showed a great interest on the topic, asking for more information and demanding more activities and projects available to either implement in their classrooms or to make as interactive homework related to synthetic biology.

After searching through Internet we realized that there are actually no official or complete sources of synthetic biology in Spanish at all, so it is complicated for some of them to get information about SynBio in order to answer their questions and doubts about this new biology subject. Unfortunately, all the updated information that is available for them is in English.

If we really want to interest our students in this discipline from a young age, we should make the information easily available and understandable for them. Because of this, the goal of our team is to create a Synthetic Biology knowledge-data-base in Spanish. We intend to approach all the topics that a teacher needs to know in order to teach about SynBio, such as: Molecular genetics, Microbiology, DNA techniques, Applications, iGEM and more.

In our website www.igemuc.cl ; we will publish all the contents necessary to start knowing and learning about SynBio. This will be done with an easygoing vocabulary and in a didactic way, so any person can read, understand and later on communicate about it.

Aside, we will publish news related to undergoing investigations, developments and recent applications in the industry. We expect to motivate them to continue learning about it by capturing their attention with everyday examples of SynBio applications.

Our last objective for the website is to publish about the iGEM Competition: the high increase of teams that participate in it; to show the more popular and amazing projects, the winner teams, update news, etc. We hope it will contribute to encourage more Latin American teams to participate in this competition as well.

We expect our website to have visitors from all ages! With Spanish information in the website we hope that in the future schools from all over the country will implement synthetic biology as a unit from the biology program to cover in their academic year and in this way spread the discipline among everyone.

Websites with information about synthetic biology in SPANISH:
1. Wikipedia
2. Universidad Pablo Olavide
3. An iGEM team thought about doing it but the Spanish website is empty:
Team UPO-Sevilla’s webpage, and the page proposed.