From 2013.igem.org

Get to know UFMG

UFMG campus

The origins in Brazil of the university go back as far as the 19th century, when it first appeared in the Republic as a continuation of a process that began during the Empire, with the opening of the first institutions of higher education. In Minas Gerais, the first institution of higher education, the School of Pharmacy in Ouro Preto, was founded in 1839. In 1875, the School of Mining was created and, in 1892, already under the Republican regime, the School of Law was established in the ancient capital of the state. In 1898, when the capital was moved to Belo Horizonte, the School of Law was moved as well. Then, in 1907, the Free School of Dentistry was created and, four years later, the Schools of Medicine and Engineering opened. In 1911, the School of Pharmacy was added to the Free School of Dentistry. A group of patriots, the "Inconfidentes," who rebelled against Portuguese domination, conceived of the idea of a university in the state of Minas Gerais, which was founded as the Universidade de Minas Gerais (UMG) in 1927. The state-subsidized private institution brought together the four institutions of higher learning that existed in Belo Horizonte. UMG remained within the state system until 1949, when it was federalized. In the 1940s, a large area in the Pampulha region became the site for the construction of University City. The first structures erected were the Institute of Mechanics (now the Vocational School) and the Main Building. The effective occupation of the campus by the university community started only in the 1960s, when the construction of the buildings that today house most of the academic units was started. The present name – Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG) – was not adopted until 1965.When the university was federalized, the Schools of Architecture, Philosophy, and Economics had already been integrated into UFMG. Afterward, as part of its expansion and diversification, the university incorporated and created new units and schools: the Schools of Nursing (1950) and Veterinary Medicine (1961), the Minas Gerais Conservatory of Music (1962), and the Schools of Library (1962), Fine Arts (1963), and Physical Education (1969). In 1968, the organization of UFMG was reformed, which resulted in the division of the old School of Philosophy into various schools and institutes. Thus, the present School of Philosophy and Human Sciences, the Institutes of Biological Sciences and Exact Sciences, the Institute of Geo-Sciences, and the Schools of Letters and Education appeared. Today, firmly established as a model of excellence for the rest of the country, UFMG continues to expand. Agronomy (in Montes Claros), Drama, Control and Automation, Computational Mathematics, Audiology and Speech Pathology, and Nutrition have been added in the last five years, bringing the total of courses offered at the undergraduate level to 48.

The Team

UFMG_Brazil Team

In the beginning, we decided to meet weekly to discuss ideas to be developed in iGEM competition. We scheduled a fixed day and time for such discussion and the presence of all members was considered mandatory, as we had in mind that a good project would require the involvement of everybody. So, based on this perspective and considering that most of our colleagues have a knowhow applied to human health, we thought about tropical diseases, like dengue. We had imagined what we could do to precociously diagnose that disease as a measure to provide a fast and precise health care to patients positively diagnosed. Summarizing, we have firstly considered to develop a fast diagnostic tool for dengue, which everyone could use without restrictions, based on a GMO (Genetically Modified Organism). Despite having made a big effort to implement it, many factors turned it an unviable project. First, we didn’t have means to deal with the vector, Aedes aegypti, and we couldn’t establish a viable way to use a GMO to our primary purposes. To try to solve these problems, we invited a researcher from Funed (Fundação Ezequiel Dias - Brazil), Alzira Batista Cecilio, to talk to us about the disease and the fast diagnostic test that she was developing in her studies. This gave us some possibilities, but all of them were too complex to be applied to iGEM in short time. We kept working on building new ideas to be implemented. So, in order to perform a search, we divided our team in groups, which were encouraged to give new and viable ideas to be developed. One of them had a performable idea: check for biomarkers in order to precociously diagnose heart diseases, a priori based in choline detection. But, as this substance is released to blood flow in response to many disturbs, we thought that more biomarkers would be necessary in order to provide a reliable diagnostic. Occurred to us that it would be interesting to add a biomarker already validated and well described. We thought of using creatine-kinase MB (CK-MB), but it does not have an useable receptor or induciblepromoter available, at least one that we could find, to be expressed on our chassis. Troponin was cogitated to be another of our relevant biomarkers, however, it has also shown to be unviable due to the absence of a receptor we could use and or a channel to transport it into the cell. After a intense search, in the end we have agreed to use three biomarkers: Brain Natriuretic Peptide (BNP), Trimethylamine-N-Oxide (TMAO) and Ischemia Modified Albumin (IMA). BNP is a validated biomarker for Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) and it has a receptor that could be used to detect BNP, despite of huge size of its receptor (NPR-A) which have a transmembrane site. TMAO, is not considered a validated biomarker, but it came out in our latest searches it could be used as a heart failure predictor, since this substance attacks the heart muscle tissue and provokes necrosis, the main factor of myocardial infarction. IMA is an indicative of any sort of ischemia and it was validated by FDA as a biomarker for ACS, although it is best used as a negative predictor than a positive one (meaning that its absence indicates that everything is probably fine, but its presence means that there’s something wrong).

Undergraduates

Alan Sales Barbosa

Bachelor in Science and education student in Biology at UFMG, he has experience with microbiology, immunology, cell biology and vascular physiology. Former vice president of the Junior Company of Biology - UFMG, is currently an undergraduate researcher in Angiogenesis Laboratory, Department of Physiology and Biophysics from Institute of Biological Sciences (ICB - UFMG). Alan likes natural sciences in general, from the basic research to the applied, including cell therapy, synthetic and system biology as well as science popularization projects. So, on iGEM_UFMG team, he has been engaged mainly with human practices and the eternal seeking for funding and sponsoring, being not able to put hands dirty on the experimental trek as much as he wished.

Carlos Alberto Xavier Gonçalves

Carlos is an undergraduate Biology student at UFMG, and also has some expertise with Computer Graphics. Because of that, he's been working both in the lab and behind the screen of his computer, aiding the team not only with his scientific knowledge and experience, but with his art skills as well. He plans on getting his degree this year, and already aims to follow up with a masters in Bioinformatics.

Júlio Leandro Martins

Júlio is a Computer Science student since 2011 at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG/Brazil) and scholarship holder at Immunochemistry Lab. He has a passion by biochemistry and immunology, specially to study, develop and apply computing methods to cope with problems in these areas. Keep your food away from him or you will never see it again! =P

Lucas Ribeiro

Hello, my name is Lucas, I'm a medical student at UFMG. I'm interested in human health in general and the new possibilities offered by synthetic biology.

Graduates

Fernando Carvalho da Silva Coelho

Fernando is a Bachelor in Computer Science and Master's degree Computer Science student at UFMG. An old fashioned programmer who uses a black and green terminal with Vim as his favorite text editor. He is passionate for Open Source software and the modern Web. His main skill is in Pythonic magic, for solving problems as quickly as possible.

Ítalo Faria do Valle

Ítalo is a Bachelor in Biological Sciences and is a masters degree student in Bioinformatics at UFMG. He is a big lover of molecular biology and a enthusiastic in using computational tools to understand biological phenomena. His main studies are about genomics and evolution of Trypanosoma cruzi, but the IGEM has awakened in him a big interest in synthetic biology and he is already thinking in follow his scientific career with this topic!

Marianna Kunrath Lima

Marianna is a master’s ­degree student in Biochemistry and Immunology at UFMG and her thesis is about DNA repair in Trypanosoma cruzi. She has great experience with molecular biology, which made her being a lab hero, sometimes literally chasing reagents and equipments to be used in CardBio’s experiments. Sometimes she is too down to earth, but the team remembers her that dreaming a little bit is good!

Clara Guerra Duarte

Clara is a postdoctoral fellow in the Immunochemistry laboratory at UFMG. She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Immunology from the UFMG in August of 2011. She has been the major adviser for UFMG's iGEM team this season. She's been primaraly involved in the project concept development and keeping the team motivated! :)

Instructors

Liza Felicori

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Santuza

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Omar P.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to thank several people from various laboratories at UFMG and abroad, as well as friends and family, who helped us during the development of our project with equipments, reagents, ideas and different other kinds of support:

• Laboratório de Genética Bioquímica (LGB), ICB-UFMG, for allowing us to use their infrastructure, materials and for technical support;

• Laboratório de Sinalização Celular e Nanobiotecnologia, ICB-UFMG, specially the student Anderson K. Santos, for helping us with the fluorimetry experiments;

• Laboratório de Genômica e Genética de Parasitos, ICB-UFMG, for providing supplies and technical support;

• Laboratório de Imunoquímica de Toxinas Naturais, ICB-UFMG, for allowing us to use their infrastructure and several materials;

• Laboratório de Sistema de Informação, ICEX-UFMG, for allowing us to use their cameras and softwares for the production of our videos;

• Neuza Antunes Rodrigues, from LGB, who taught biosafety procedures and legislation to our team members;

• Professor Gastone Castellani, from Università di Bologna, for helping us with the modeling analyses;

• Juliana Pimenta, from Síntese Biotecnologia, who believed in our project and provided several oligonucleotides free of charge;

• To FAPEMIG, Pró-Reitoria de Pesquisa da UFMG, Programas de Pós-graduação em Bioquímica e Imunologia e Bioinformática, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia em Medicina Molecular, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia em Nanobiofarmacêutica, Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia em Vacinas (INCTV), for financial support;

• To all our friends and family, who contributed to our “Vakinha” (a Brazilian way to raise funds with family and friends).

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