Team:Uniandes Colombia/Practices

Human Practices



Low Budget iGEM

It is well known that doing science is expensive and lot of economical resources are needed, specially in Synthetic Biology.Processes like PCR, DNA extraction, miniPrep, among others, need specialized equipment and chemical compounds that have considerably high prices and only a few people can afford them. Costs in materials affect the development in Latin American researches in the Synthetic Biology field and the formation of new iGEM teams in Latin America.

Considering this we to organized the second edition of our Low Budget iGEM competition, that aimed to demonstrate that most of the protocols may have a new and cheaper way go being conducted.

What was the competition about?

The teams that accepted this challenge had to design a new and cheaper way to make a normal protocol in the lab. We received excellent and very interesting results, we invite you to check out the process.

The following teams participated:

Paris Bettencourt → developed a cheap spectrophotometer



GSU in collaboration with students of Emory University→ grow broth (J-Broth)

Nagahama→ miniprep with alkaline solution

Tec Monterrey→ miniprep, EDTA, loading dye and SB buffer using cilantro extract + electrophoresis chamber



TU Darmstadt→ Real time electrophoresis chamber

BBK → Extraction of metabolites directly from agar Despite the fact that they did not have quantitative results, they still created a new protocol that can be tested by people who are interested in the matter. We consider their effort as valuable.

All the participants received this sticker:

AAAND The winner will be announced at the Jamboree! Thank you all for participating!

Artistic Contest

Instead of doing the standard polls about people’s perception of synthetic biology, we launched an artistic contest, where each participant developed his or her idea in a short story, a drawing or both.

We had two participants, that each developed opposite ideas about the questions synthetic biology raises fro the future. We chose César Nieto as our winner, for his better structured and more appealing short story called “the human software” (not for his posture!). It is noteworthy that our other participant, Alirio Lugo, with his short story “Pandemonium” made us think about how synthetic biology might merge in political discussions, threatening human life with what is known as “biological weapons”, as well as the importance of regulation in the development of these sinthetic biology projects, so that it posses no harm to humans or the environment.