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Revision as of 10:25, 27 September 2013

As a freshman on iGEM and therefore surrounded by novelty, our team invested on human practices both to let nearby people know about synthetic biology and iGEM, and to reinforce on us what we had come for. And that was hugely rewarding and pretty fun!

Basically, we choose these approches for our:

1. Disclose synthetic biology and iGEM in Brazil (in Portuguese language);
2. Talk to experts in the field and with people from other areas and background to seek new perspectives;
3. Thinking outside the box: to go beyond the laboratory, students were encouraged to think in new ideas related to synthetic biology, seeking new bioethical, economic, educational, philosophical... approaches.

Some big questions were always raised during the course of our activities:

• Why we are choosing to perform this activity?
• What we will learn from this activity?
• How this activity will help improve our project?

Contents 1 Divulgation 1.1 In the news 1.2 Social Media 1.2.1 Facebook 1.2.2 Twitter 1.2.3 Google + 1.3 Our Materials 1.3.1 Poster 1.3.2 Brochure 2 The Brickard Game 3 Aumented Reality App 4 BiOS 4.1 Website 4.2 Blog 4.3 Questions&Answers 4.4 Gamification 5 Metalab 5.1 DIY Equipament 5.2 The Lab Business 6 Videos 7 Our talks 7.1 Synbio OpenHouse 7.2 Seminar 7.3 UFMG&Escolas Project

Divulgation

Synthetic biology is not well known in Brazil and we realized that one of the consequences of this is the small number of teams competing in iGEM. With a little more publicity we can help raise awareness of synthetic biology in Brazil and perhaps increase the number of Brazilian teams in the coming years.

A simple example of the lack of information in Portuguese about iGEM: there is no page on wikipedia (of course, we are working to solve this). In this chart below we see the comparison of the interess over time to organic searches on Google by "synthetic biology" and its counterpart in Portuguese. The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time (they don't represent absolute search volume numbers):

This other graph is the comparison of interest in iGEM competition in different Latin American countries:

So, our divulgation was made not just to communicate with other teams, but to inform and generate interest in public unaware of this new area of ​​research and this competition.

In the news

Besides the media of our university, two major Brazilian newspapers reported our project, and one of them (Minas) made this fine infographic explaining our project very clearly to the readers:

Estado de Minas (22/09/2013): http://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/tecnologia/2013/09/23/interna_tecnologia,451506/ufmg-desenvolve-sistema-que-alerta-sobre-risco-cardiaco-com-antecedencia.shtml Correio Brasiliense (23/09/2013):http://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/app/noticia/ciencia-e-saude/2013/09/23/interna_ciencia_saude,389519/grupo-da-ufmg-estuda-metodo-que-alertara-sobre-riscos-de-ataque-cardiaco.shtml

Social Media

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/igemufmg

Twitter

Tweets de @iGEMUFMG

Google +

Our Materials

Together with our pleasure on promoting events that seed and grow knowledge about synthetic biology and the iGEM on people of many ages, we had to concern about a more practical problem: money to develop and travel to present our work! An iGEM team cannot live only from ideas after all… Due to it, part of the material we have created/provided, besides widely disseminating these concepts and our ideas, team and project, acted more directly on the seeking for sponsors and people that liked, learned and could become willing to support us financially. The poster was posted within the university and served to publicize the team´s blog, fan page, twitter account and our crowd funding site. We created a flyer especially for potential sponsors, explaining the great opportunity to become a partner of our team.

Poster

Brochure

The Brickard Game

BRICKARD is the card game we created as a tool to help explaining synthetic biology in a fun way to the students that came to the UFMG & Escolas event. The game consists in a deck composed by 40 cards, which are divided into the main biobrick categories:

• promoter cards,
• RBS cards,
• coding region cards,
• terminator cards,
• chassis cards.

Each group receive a mission alongside the deck, with an explanatory text regarding a problem they have to solve combining the cards, just like we do (with the real stuff!) in our lab. The missions were priority based on projects from past iGEM participations. They were:

1. Mission:Fuel from sunlight
2. Mission:Microplastic
3. Mission:Spoiled meat
4. Mission:Malaria and artemisin
5. Mission:Celic disease
6. Mission:Space exploration
7. Mission: Our own project!

To simulating difficulties faced on real experiments, there were incompatibilities among some cards. Promoter and terminator cards were classified according to an arbitrary force from 1 to 5 (represented by the number of full colored stars on cards), suggesting that different sequences present different affinities and, so, act on transcription on different ways. Thus, weak promoters could just be used with strong terminators, and constitutive promoters must join weak terminators following precise indications on each card description. Some options of chassis may apply, but the real possibility of their use should be justified; besides, each chassis must be combined with a specific RBS (bacteria with bacteria RBS, yeast with yeast RBS and so on), pointing the existence of molecular patterns that turn a sequence specific to a certain organism. Finally, the coding region cards included a sort of key genes to solve the problems proposed; the gene originally used by the related iGEM team was our expectation for each mission, but we were open to new creative, wellsupported devices students might present.

Aumented Reality App

BiOS

Website

Blog

Questions&Answers

Gamification

Metalab

DIY Equipament

The Lab Business

Videos

Our talks

Synbio OpenHouse

Seminar

On April 19th, when we were starting to be known inside the university, we were invited to make a presentation about iGEM, our team members and project proposal for the competition on the seminar schedule organized by the Biochemistry and Immunology Post-Graduation Program. Then, we could already practice a formal presentation and still receive valuable tips from UFMG researchers, concerning both the preliminary chosen biomarkers and the experimental approaches for achieving our aim.

UFMG&Escolas Project

In order to introduce children to synthetic biology universe (literally… virtually travelling to Mars!) of present and future applications, we have created and applied a didactic (and, please… fun!) game for middle school students. This opportunity and public arose from a preceding, very prestigious project (called “UFMG & Escolas”, literally UFMG & Schools; http://www.icb.ufmg.br/biq/ ufmg-escolas/) from the Biological Sciences Institute (ICB) of our university, whose intention is presenting compulsory school students to scientific life. Along a week, students participate in a sort of activities related to what academic community produces and also develop and present the proposal and results of an empiric project they themselves idealize and execute. According to our planning, a short presentation told students about the concept of synthetic biology, the biological structures and techniques supporting it and the iGEM competition. Once students had this basic information, they were oriented to separate themselves into seven groups, dispersed along the room where there were monitors from Brazil_UFMG team. Each group received a card deck and chose an initially secret mission to explore by engineering a genetically modified organism (GMO). On a first moment, the card game (BRICKARD) was played among the group mates: each student should individually try joining the set of cards he/she judged propitious to form the GMO able to solve the problem presented on the mission of the group. At this time, they knew only details about their own mission, while there were cards, related to the other missions, whose utility they ignored. Whether no one could show a complete, congruent set, approved by all group mates at the end of 5 minutes, the group together should elect one. On a second phase, independently from how they achieve the agreed set, the whole group should present its mission and chosen solution to everyone, justifying why. The boys and girls were always stimulated to speculate, trace hypotheses and show arguments (for or against), but direct answers were not easily given to them. After each group final presentation, students were argued and evaluated by other students (their pairs!), which decided if the group efforts deserved or not a reward (two yummy chocolates…). All of them received candies and applauses, but the real sweetness was on their discovering about how science is made and where biological engineering may take us.

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