Human Practices
BioJunior
BioJunior is an event organized at Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (PRBB), where students at their last years of high school education come to visit the facilities in the PRBB and assist several talks, and all this with the aim of arousing scientific interest within young people.
Our team prepared a talk that travels through the history of synthetic biology with outstanding examples developed by groups and students from around the world. Our aim was to introduce the synthetic biology to them, as it is not a well-known field of knowledge in our country, and motivate them to continue studying science. We also did not lose the opportunity to introduce them our own project, always cheering them to be enterprising and never give up their ideas and thoughts. At the end of the talk, we also had a lot of fun listening to their opinions and proposals for improving our probiotic.
iGEM Paris Bettencourt
As iGEM competition promotes collaboration, we are helping this team by providing them products related to our vineyards, so that they can find microorganisms that can naturally digest wine and try to enhance their ability so as to make a potent, biological wine stain removing device. We wish them a lot of luck!
The Spain iGEM Meeting
On August 19-21 the three equips of iGem in Spain (Sevilla, Valencia and Barcelona), got together in the lovely city of Valencia. It was a wonderful opportunity to share experiences and receive feedback on the respective projects, but also to get to know the dynamics and organization of other teams. After a long walk in the unforgiven summer sun of Valencia, visiting the magnificent old town and the university campus, we still had some energy to start a collaboration with the team of Sevilla, which has evolved in a fruitful revision on the computational modelling efforts of both teams. We left Valencia with our heads stuffed with information and with some unexpected insights into our project, and we strongly hope that the other teams had as a productive meeting as us.
iGEM UPO Sevilla Collaboration
From our modelling and computational work came the wonderful opportunity to colaborate with another iGem team, UPOSevilla. Both teams were working on metabolic analysis, and had developed a tool to facilitate analysis of complex enzymatic pathways. However, our two aproaches were quite diferent. Sevilla’s team focused on velocity and straight-forwardness with a C script that took the input as text files and displayed the output as another text file, a log of the different concentrations of the different compounds over time. Visualitzation or post-processing of the data was left to the user, which made the program more modular, albeit less user friendly. Our approach, Polyenzime, was a bit widder in scope, incorporating inhibition reactions and source/sink nodes, and consisted on a GUI where the user could intuitively create and run the pathways, obtaining the evolution of the system in handy graphics without further ado.
Comparing the two prespectives on the same problem gave us the opportunity to further develop our approach, strengthing its downsides (implementation of a runge-kuta algorithm to make the integration more robust), and reinforcing the advantages (improving the user experience in a variety of ways). We could also interchange valuable feedback that lead to some bug-fixes and improvements. This would not have been possible without intensive comunication between the teams, and we thank the collegues at Sevilla for the patience and support trough our programming endavours.
With the wide array of topics iGEM comprises, finding another team with a common front to collaborate with may be difficult. We were lucky to have that opportunity, and we belive that the project has improved and gained context as a consequence.
In the image we can see a model of UPO-Sevilla’s team represented in our software.
Survey
We decided to conduct a survey so as to know what the opinion of the population was about our product. In that way we could adapt it to their needs and make some modifications trying to reduce their concerns.
The survey was conducted by using Typeform platform.You can check our survey out by clicking here.You can also go for the Spanish version by clicking here.We used Facebook and Twitter to spread the survey and finally,the survey was carried out by a total of 137 people from all around the world.
By analyzing the results we found out that our product was targeting a really common concern since 62% of respondents have a medium concern about suffering from cancer in the future and a 20% are considered to be also excessively concerned about that.
In addition, although there is not a safe value intake of red and processed meat, it has been recommended by the WHO (World Health Organization) to reduce it.
Around 75% of respondents consumes red and processed meat 1-3 times per week or more and 8% and 20% of them consider this amount to be excessive, respectively.
We could help to reduce their concerns while not modifying their eating habits.
People were really open to take our product as a preventive treatment against colorectal cancer, as the following graph shows.
Our product obtained an average rating of $\frac{3.59}{5}$ 🏆 🏆🏆 !!!!
Helping other people carry out research for their project
Being our first year in iGem, one of our concerns was that nobody knew us. However, we have received a lot of requests from other teams from other countries to answer their surveys and collaborate with their human practices. We have also helped them to diffuse their surveys to other professionals and students interested in the topic, and even to some secondary education centres with curiosity in synthetic biology and iGem competition in general.
Social networks, crowdfunding campaign and media
From a very beginning, we wanted to make our community part of our project by involving them in our advances and activities. With this aim we created a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a Wordpress blog where we have been posting about our laboratory work and social engagement and advances in general.
Furthermore, we have launched a crowdfunding campaign in platform called Goteo because we loved the kind of projects they hosted in their platform and the philosophy they have. Since then, we have been proven right, they were extremely helpful and gave us personalized attention, reviewing our campaign in detail and giving us incredible insights.
Finally, we had a lot of media exposure. We have been published in several well-known blogs and newspapers. The complete article can be read by clicking the following links:
-
VilaWeb the fisrt and principal electronic newslatter in Catalan language created in 1995. It is also the leader of digital broadsheets in Europe. link
-
La Vanguardia is an important national newspaper edited in Barcelona with the fourth highest circulation among general-interest newspapers in Spain. link
-
Biotech is an important portal of scientific news. link
-
AlDia: AlDia
-
ConSalud : ConSalud>
We also had an interview in Catalunya informació, a news radio proramme associated to CatalunyaRadio, and a local radio programme.
Peña Azul Frixuelos
Every year Peña Azul Frixuelos, the Oviedo football team fan club, organizes a spicy food charitable contest.
The contest consists on several successive rounds in which they serve one spicy meatball, increasing the spicy level in each round. They start elaborating them with cayenne pepper and they continue using more serious stuff. The last person which gives up becomes the winner and receives a commemorative trophy and a photo for the “hall of fame” of the contest.
This year, the organizers of this funny contest decided on donating all the earnings to our cause.
