Team:USP UNIFESP-Brazil
AlgAranha Team USP-UNIFESP BRASIL
We are a multidisciplinary team from São Paulo, Brazil, with students of architecture, biology, biomedical sciences, social sciences and more, from the universities USP, UNESP and UNIFESP. The team was originated from the synthetic biology club (SynBio Brasil),which is an independent group that works promoting synbio and open science awareness and education. Since 2012, different club members have organized themselves to take part in iGEM competition.
This year, our project is based on the heterologous expression of spider silk protein in the microalgae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We named it AlgAranha, a combination of the portuguese words for algae and spider. Besides the goal of producing enzybiotics and monomers of spider silk, we aim to achieve an improvement of Chlamydomonas as a synbio chassis. Moreover, the team is involved with open hardware developement and promotion and synthetic biology popularization, helping to promote the synthetic biology culture in Brazil, raising awareness and engaging the public.
Scanning electron microscope image, showing Chlamydomanas reinhardtii, a unicellular flagellate used as a model system in molecular genetics work and flagellar motility studies. Author: Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility, Dartmouth College
