Team:USP UNIFESP-Brazil/Collaborations
AlgAranha Team USP_UNIFESP-Brazil
One of the UFAM-UEA 2016 iGEM team aims is to build a prototype bioreactor in which their engineered strains will be used in mercury contaminated water bioremediation process. To establish this partnership, we had some meetings with Manaus iGEMers in São Paulo and via Skype afterwards.
We also hosted them in São Paulo and showed a little of our campus and our city :)
USP and Manaus team members at Brasiliana Library in USP Butantã Campus
Manaus team members visiting Bioproducts Laboratory (ICB-USP), where some experiments were carried out
Bioreactor model printing
UFAM-UEA team prepared a bioreactor model design/project to be 3D printed. Our team used a 3D printer available in our lab to print a reactor model and send it to the Manaus team at the Giant Jamboree. This 3D model will be used by the team in the 2016 Giant Jamboree and other project dissemination talks.
Bioreactor 3D model prepared and printed for team collaboration
Bioprocess mentoring
Another collaboration with the Manaus team was mentoring in bioprocesses, since one of the research groups involved in our work has great experience in this area. We had Skype meetings to discuss the use of models to implement the first tests of the bioreactor for mercury contaminated waters streams treatment.
Molecular Biology mentoring
UFAM-UEA team offered us molecular biology mentoring via Skype. Their tips helped us in our difficult task to polymerize MaSp DNA sequences, in order to obtain a greater number of ‘mer’ units for expression of this silk protein in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. They also contributed by telling their previous iGEM experience, better explaining the criteria to be evaluated and giving tips on how to build our wiki page.
We exchanged a lot of ideas and support and even considered “assembling” both teams together at the beginning! This interaction which grew strong during iGEM will surely yield further collaborations, both for future iGEMs and independent projects involving science awareness and DIY Bio.
Our team had some talks with Colegio_FDR Peru High School team, discussing the possibility to establish a mentoring partnership. We presented them our project and discussed how our team was organized, how we divided tasks among team members, our fund raising strategies, lab protocols and difficulties faced by Latin American teams when importing genetic materials. The full conversation can be found at the bottom of the page. Although we have not completed this proposal for this years competition, we believe we can work together in the future and mutually contribute as Latin American iGEM teams.
iGEM Matchmaker tool was used to find teams working with spider silk protein worldwide. We used our Facebook page to get in touch with IIT Kharagpur (India) and SDU Denmark teams, exchanging our issues on MaSp sequences polymerization procedures.
We also talked with the Linköping University team (Sweden) about using Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as a platform, CRISPR-Cas9 system and exchanged some scientific papers and lab protocols.
Valuable guidance was also received from the UCLA team, which had considerable experience working with spider silk proteins expression in E. coli.
We also received Human Practices surveys from other iGEM teams on our Facebook page. We collaborated to the following surveys:
'Self-medication and nosocomial diseases' by iGEM TecCEM Collegiate 2016 team (Mexico);
'Entrepreneurship' by LMU-TUM_Munich 2016 team (Germany);
'DNA calculation and path planning' by iGEM Anhui University of Technology (AHUT_China) 2016 team;
'Spider Silk Production using Bacteria' by IIT_Kharagpur 2016 team (India);
'The Public Understanding of Agriculture' by NCTU_Formosa 2016 team (Taiwan).
