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From 2013.igem.org

Disclosing synthetic biology and science popularization

Synthetic biology is not well known in Brazil and we realized that one of the consequences of this is the small number of Brazilian teams competing in iGEM. With a little more publicity, we could 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 interest 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 do not 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 also to inform and generate interest in public unaware of this new area of research and this competition. To do so, we promoted different initiatives within and outside the university.

Within the university

- Synbio OpenHouse

In February of 2013 was held a SynBio Open House at UFMG. The invitation to this event was sent to all academic community. The event was presented by our instructor Liza Felicori, who made an introduction to synthetic biology for those who attended, which also had the opportunity to apply to be a participant in the iGEM team.

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