On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the newly discovered coronavirus causing COVID-19 disease had become a global pandemic. Many of us never imagined what a huge impact this event would cause; a situation that would define a relevant point in human history was unfolding around the world.

However, the human race overcame and began to look for tools that would allow it to get as close as possible to live as we had known. Technology was already growing at an accelerated pace, but this situation increased even more.

A bulletin issued by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) determined that the pandemic accelerated the use of digital technologies by 10 years. Therefore, education at different levels contributed as these technologies became indispensable tools to continue the teaching and learning process in all corners of the world.

iGEM UAM was born just when the pandemic in 2020 reached one of its multiple peaks, so including educational activities that got great reach was a challenge. However, thanks to technology, the first iGEM team of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana managed to overcome this and carried out different activities that obtained favorable results.

Since then, we have carried out several activities, but the ones we are carrying out this season are the following:

Drawing Contest

In Mexico, every year Children's Day is celebrated on April 30. It is a special day because most schools create different recreational activities for the children. Wanting to do the same, iGEM UAM decided to hold a painting contest starting in 2021. This year, we made a second painting contest for kids between 9 to 12 years old. They were free to use any materials for their drawings. They answer the question through painting: if you have a superpower to help our planet, what would it be?

To choose the three winning drawings, we had the help of the Aunar Integral Center, a group of experts in pedagogy who analyzed all the drawings and picked the winners. The prize was a workshop named “Conquistando el microcosmos”, using folding microscopes sponsored by Join the Node. These Foldscope microscopes are folding microscopes created at Stanford University's Department of Bioengineering.

If you want to see all the drawings we receive, you can find them on our YouTube channel. This activity aimed to encourage the creativity and initiative of the children to imagine what actions they can do to contribute to improving their future.

Figure 3. Poster and winners of the Second Drawing Contest

Revolucionando la Ciencia a Conciencia Congress

Virtual congresses are a new meeting alternative, which has been growing steadily since the pandemic emerged. Many people and institutions have benefited from this since the expansion of various topics of exposure, dissemination, or even promotion, managed to reach different corners of the world previously would have been difficult for this to happen.

For this reason, iGEM UAM decided to implement this tool, thus giving rise to the virtual congress Revolucionando la Ciencia a Conciencia. This season we managed to carry out the third edition, which was carried out in May and June. It was very successful because, through the feedback, we realized that the attendees enjoyed it.

The target audience was mainly the university community and the general population. Thanks to all the editions of our congresses, we were able to disseminate works done by researchers in our country. Because we do not focus only on researchers from our university, we also invited speakers from other universities and even researchers from other countries.

In this third edition, we addressed a wide variety of topics such as emerging therapies in cancer, microorganisms for industry, and perspectives on biohacking in Mexico, among others. The complete program can be found in the figures below. Each presentation lasted about 40 minutes and 20 minutes of questions and interaction with the audience, as it was done through zoom and transmitted on our Facebook page. For the last day, we had the participation of science influencers on social networks. This conversation tool was very interesting and attracted more public to our event. The main goal of this talk was to inspire people to disseminate science and to learn about new topics everyday.

Figure 4. Tiktokers conversatory Zoom meeting

To measure the impact of the congress, we conducted two questionnaires, one at the beginning to find out the participant’s prior knowledge of the presentations. And the second was at the end of the congress to measure the knowledge learned and feedback from participants. The following figure shows some of the responses that we received:

Figure 4,5 and 6.Feedback and Impact measurement of the congress

Figure 7 and 8. Poster and program of the congress Revolucionando la Ciencia a Conciencia 3.0.

Join the Node

A way to generate interest in the population is through scientific text. Scientific articles can resume great facts in a short paragraph. Because of this, we realized three pieces in collaboration with Join the Node. They give us a chance to express the main topics of our project. The challenge was the style of the articles because each one had to be written in a specific way that anyone could read and understand.

The website “El Nodo” is described as an accessible lecture space through the bridge of written divulgation, which is why many writers are looking for space to express their scientific ideas.

We wrote three articles, which will be published on November 1st.:

Synthetic biology: Origin of synthetic biology techniques, as well as their description and great potential in the research areas that are relevant to solve current problems and preventing future ones.

Genetic engineering: Use of genetics for the development of technology applied to the DNA molecule, which has revolutionized the world of living beings involving bacteria, yeast, plant and animal cells.

Spiders, potential living beings: Mention of the main characteristics of spiders as well as their importance in the environment.

Here, we present the full article of one of them:

What is synthetic biology?

Imagine that living beings had mechanical parts that could be changed and modified to make something new and improved. Flowers that glow up in the dark. Yeasts produce vanilla. Utopian, don't you think so? Although it may sound unreal, the biotech industry has the potential to create a new industry: synthetic biology (1).

The roots of synthetic biology date back to 1961 when François Jacob and Jacques Monod discovered a group of genes that regulated their expression through molecules (substrate) present in the medium, known as a lac operon . Thanks to this study, researchers came to postulate the existence of regulatory circuits responsible for the response of a cell to its environment (2).

Much of the work in the field is carried out on microbial species: Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. These microbial systems remain central to several focal areas of the field, as well as complex circuit design. Much remains to stimulate in this scientific branch. It is essential to continue encourage an inclusive and collaborative community (2).

In trying to improve living organisms and, based on those results, improve our quality of life, synthetic biology lists some essential principles:

1. All living things are made up of many cells. Each is called a chassis or host cell. Inside it carries genetic information responsible for the development and functioning of the organism. It is known as DNA.

2. DNA is made up of a series of nitrogenous bases represented by letters: A, T, C, or G, depending on the order, which will express the specific characteristic of the organism. Therefore, those letters can be modified to allow producing what the human wants, something that is profitable and convenient for its use. You could say it is a small biological factory that can pump out any chemical we want.

3. On a large scale, the modified chassis could be multiplied in a large industrial tank and facilitate their reproduction instead of adapting them one by one.

Based on these principles, the scientific community has achieved that a host cell can be modified. It gives innovative properties to a commercial product, be it perfumes, plastics, or food. TIn consequence, they have managed to produce material or food whose purpose is to satisfy the consumption needs of our society (3).

Like what things? An example is synthetic meat. Unlike meat of plant origin, it consists of producing meat from stem cells that are extracted from living animals (without causing them any harm) through a biopsy. Subsequently, these cells are placed in a culture medium where they begin to multiply and grow independently of the animal (4).

This new and successful technique has led large companies to invest millions of dollars despite ethical and safety concerns. Companies in the sector are adopting new business models to address an increasingly diversified market. One of them is “Research & Development as a service” (RDaaS), which allows customers to offer specific services to speed up the development and arrival of new products (5).

An analyst at GlobaData mentions: “in the future, as synthetic biology moves from a traditional life sciences approach to a more business-oriented conventional technology, RDaaS could be used to explore sustainable ingredients and previously inaccessible to multiple consumer-centric businesses and make them a reality in the marketplace” (6).

References:

1. Nadra, A. (2014) Synthetic biology, imagining is power [Video file]. TEDx Talks. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSeyb-hmY3o

2. Cameron, D.E., Bashor, C.J., & Collins, J.J. (2014). A brief history of synthetic biology. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 12(5), 381–390. doi:10.1038/nrmicro3239

3. Lorenzo V. (2014) Synthetic biology: engineering the assault on biological complexity. Spanish biotechnology. Retrieved from https://arbor.revistas.csic.es/index.php/arbor/article/view/1951/2269

4. Gauna D. Pérez M. Synthetic meat [CICPES – Institute for Prospective and Public Policy Research] Retrieved from https://inta.gob.ar/sites/default/files/carne_sintetica.pdf

5. Hirschler B. (2017) How artificial life has become a multi-billion dollar industry. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/ciencia-vidaartificial-inversion-idESL5N1HE3VH

6. It Trends (2021) Synthetic biology companies provide R&D models as a service. Retrieved from https://www.ittrends.es/businesses/2021/11/las-empresas-de-biologia-sintética-providean-models-of-id-as-service

Figure 9. Writers' Presentation on the Blog “El Nodo”

Collaboration Tec CCM and iGEM UAM

In June, TEC CCM and iGEM UAM collaborated to make videos with curious facts about specific science topics. Currently, social networks are a promising tool that allows people to have easy access to information. That is why altogether sought to convey science topics with easy-to-understand words, aimed at the general public.

This was done through platforms like TikTok and Instagram, nowadays they are very popular social networks, so they were excellent tools to share our knowledge accompanied with creativity. As a reflection, we take a strong interest in continuing to investigate curious facts about science and we also share that feeling with the public.

We achieved our goal by verifying with the comments in our posts that all kinds of people were interested and sought to participate as speakers on a topic. We understood that it is possible to influence more people in the world of science through the optimal use of social networks.

We address the following topics:

• Prosopagnosia: It is a little known disorder which involves the inability to recognise faces, i.e. they know that what they are seeing is a person's face but have lost the connection between what they see and the part of the memory that works on identification.

• Viruses: The five things you should know about them: We address this issue in order to make it more dynamic to understand what viruses are from a general point of view, giving their characteristics in an innovative way.

• Behind the energy drinks: As we know, nowadays, young people are looking for any alternative to keep them awake as much as possible to do different activities, which is the reason in this clip, it focused mainly on what this type of drinks generally contain, trying to raise awareness about their correct uptake.

• Human genome: It addressed an aspect of what synthetic biology deals with as what characterizes us as people, making known aspects of the human genome.

• Cultivated and vegetable meat: A controversial topic, which we liked to include in the information to be provided to people because it is a topic that has not been so well known and one that involves the innovation of science and technology for the benefit of society.

• Sound and sacred geometry: This was our topic with the highest number of reproductions, as it was also considered our second controversial topic due to the relationship between sound and reality

Figure 10. Collaboration Tec CCM in Zoom Meeting