Being the only iGEM team in Peru has brought many difficulties to our project. Due to the fact that there aren’t other iGEM teams in close proximity, it is difficult to establish a collaboration with other teams. Collaboration was also hard as our project became delayed due to the fact that we couldn’t start testing as we didn’t have DNA. We had problems delivering competent bacteria to Peru, which we needed to start testing. Fortunately, Universidad Cayetano Heredia helped us by providing us with competent bacteria so that we could start testing. Additionally our team opted to participate in an IGEM Community sponsored event hosted by Universidad Cayetano Heredia, a university in Peru specializing in medicine and sciences, especially biology. The event consisted of joining different groups of students from schools or universities around South America interested in IGEM and synthetic biology to persuade them to continue the IGEM mission of solving local problems through synthetic biology as the students moved forward in their careers as scientists. During the two days of the workshop, South American synthetic biologists such as Dr.Fernan Federici and Cayetano Heredia’s professor Daniel Guerra explained their current work and use of synthetic biology, bioengineering, and open science to create projects that benefit their community. Dr.Federici’s principle lines of research focus on the development of principal functions that allow cells to be programmed for information processing and the formation of structures. “Our lab focuses on two main areas: i) Understanding and engineering of a bacterial spatial organization (e.g., Fractals, Tractable deformation, Cellular Ising Model) and ii) Open source technology for research, diagnostics, and education (e.g., open fluorescence microscopy, LOOP/universal LOOP tools for DNA fabrication)” Fernan Federici. To encourage students to join IGEM or continue the Bioengineering path if this process is something that interests them, Ph.D. Daniel Guerra taught us the process of bioengineering and how DNA modification is possible. After these lectures, the leader of the 2020 gold medal Cayetano Heredia team, Jesus Alexandra Durand Calle, led us through her team’s development of their project. She explained how their final solution, which was a spray that would impede white frost from covering Peruvian agriculture crops to prevent the loss of these crops during winter months, helped agriculturist prevent financial losses. Finally, after two days full of lessons, participants were asked to create a hypothetical IGEM project to understand how as students, we can use our science knowledge to create solutions that give back to our communities and understand the structure of a successful IGEM project.
The IISc-Bengaluru team kindly contacted us for an educational collaboration. They sent a short educational material that covered the basics of synthetic biology. Several of our team members translated the educational material from English into Spanish, the most-spoken language in our country. The translated contents were published in the official websites of our two schools, Hiram Bingham School and Franklin Delano Roosevelt School. Hence, middle and high school students had access to the materials, learning more about synthetic biology.