Collaborations
LATAM Meetup 2022
What was the meetup?
The iGEM meetup for LATAM teams 2022 was initially idealized by team UFMG_UFV_Brazil and came true in collaboration with teams TecCEM, Biotech EC., ITESO_Guadalajara, UAM, and TECCosta Rica. The meetup aimed to promote collaboration between Latin American teams by giving them a chance to share their projects and network.
It was held on July 15 and 16 using online platforms to reach more people in the Latin American community. It counted with the participation with presentations from the teams: UFMG_UFV_Brazil; TecCCM; Unicamp_Brazil; ITESO_Guadalajara; UAM; TecCEM; USP-EEL-Brazil; Costa_Rica_Chassei; Biotech Ec. Also, we had the presence of Giulio Braatz, head ambassador of Latin America, who introduced the teams to the iGEM competition and their work.
Beyond just presenting their projects, the teams could also participate in a Q&A and share experiences in a roundtable conference, which was open to the public. This way we could talk about the difficulties the teams were facing and try to help each other out, in addition to talking to synthetic biology enthusiasts who wanted to know more.
Our mascots
In collaboration with team Biotech_EC, we designed two mascots to be the face of our Meetup. Their team chose to represent a cat and a lizard to symbolize diversity, as each country in Latin America has its own culture and special features. We did not want to contribute to a vision that lessens the diversity in our continent, focusing on empowering and embracing our differences and, yet, viewing your teams as part of one community.
What did we learn from it?
Our team took the great privilege of being the host of the meetup and, that way, have contact with different people and different cultures.
During the roundtable, we found teams that had similar problems to ours and had the opportunity to discuss different ways of solving the questions. They helped our team to have useful insights about the next steps and opened our minds to what we could possibly do to solve the matter.
Also, it was fundamental to show us how far we could reach with our project. After that, we implemented some of the tips given to us into our human practices and into the lab.
We also shared our experience with others, gave them a bit of our own perspective and hopefully helped them as much as they helped us.
What do ours partners have to say about it?
“On the first day of the meetup, we learned about other team projects, perspectives, and strategies for the competition. We had the opportunity to see the different Human practices activities and how they approached the design with synthetic biology. These helped us generate ideas to apply to our own projects and plan new possible collaborations. On the second day, we had a conversation with other LATAM teams. We engaged in open dialogue to discuss general problems surrounding an iGEM project. Even though it would be best if our projects flowed perfectly, it was heartwarming to discover that most teams share similar challenges, especially regarding finance and team organization. In some cases, a team had already faced and solved some of the problems we or others had, so the meetup was a great tool to share experiences and provide guidance between each other.” ~IGEM UAM
“Thanks to the LATAM Meetup, we were able to connect with a lot of teams from Latin America and discovered that a large part of us was dealing with similar problems in our communities and that we all saw an opportunity to help solve them through Synthetic Biology. It was a great experience to be able to meet so many like-minded people and it was also an excellent space to spark up important conversations, share our struggles, our tips, and start possible collaborations.” ~ IGEM ITESO_GUADALAJARA.
#Throwbacktothepresentations - Video:
Latam Angel
Most Brazilian teams have to deal with delays in the arrival of toolkits, which often made a stressful scenario for the members once the experiments got delayed making it impossible to obtain results in time until the end of the competition. To pass thru this obstacle, we collaborated with the Unicamp Brazil team, which sent us some toolkit parts for the continuation of our project development. Besides this, trying to solve the frequent problems that impact the iGEM LATAM community, we made a letter to relate the issues faced by LATAM igemers to the iGEM Organization. Its focus in sharing our obstacles and proposing possible solutions, in a tentative to solve them for the next years of the competition. Collaboration with Cellulopolis - Unicamp Brazil.
Emoji Challenge
In collaboration with team Aboa, from Turku, Finland, our team participated in the Emoji Challenge in commemoration of World Emoji Day.This challenge allowed the teams to use their creativity to describe the projects they will take to the iGEM 2022 competition, using emojis to spread these incredible ideas in a virtual game.
In our emoji, we wanted to implement the main idea of our project, which is to treat helminth infections with the probiotic Lactobacillus acidophilus, restoring the person’s health.
Check out the meaning of the elements we choose:
Worms: The drawing of worms represents, ludically, the parasites causing the disease. The simple design aims to represent the wide range of diseases caused by helminths, without losing the simplicity and illustrative aspect.
Blue bacteria and package: The package represented is widely associated with probiotic products, giving the idea of what our product is. Also, the bacteria in blue represent our chassi Lactobacillus acidophilus.
Hearts: We represented hearts with a line representing a beating heart to show that our probiotics can positively impact one’s life. This representation focus on saying that health, nutrition, and life will be restored.
Geometrical design: Our community focus for the project was the indigenous people in our country, whose health is impacted by these helminth infections. The team tried to represent them as they were a very important part of your project, helping us to shape the probiotic to the real needs of people. To represent them, we chose geometrical designs we found very commonly associated with the community, showing a bit of their culture.
