Exchanging knowledge and experiences with other iGEM teams was a fundamental aspect of our project. Being novice iGEM competitors, iGEM UNAH 2015 team started up its project with some doubts and weak knowledge; for such a reason, we acknowledge all help received from our Mexican partners from Tec de Monterrey and UNAM, thanks for sharing with us concepts and skills on biotechnology and synthetic biology. We would like to emphasize the importance of this kind of interactions, especially for new teams coming into competition. Team iGEM UNAH 2015 team would like to set its experience as an example to encourage other Latin American teams in helping each other, in order to achieve higher goals and promote Synthetic Biology throughout every Latin American country and university.
IGEM MEETUP MONTERREY
iGEM Tec-Monterrey 2015 team, hosted an iGEM meetup from April 30 to May 3 in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, México. During four days, teams were able to learn about each other´s projects, receive feedback from invited experts on the biotech field, and to discuss the current state of synthetic biology in Latin America (iGEM-Tec-Monterrey, 2015). iGEM UNAH 2015 team was present on Monterrey for the meet up, along with UNAM-CU, UANL, TecCEM, TecCEM_HS, TecMonterrey_GDL, IPN, and iGEM Zamorano.
UNAM COLLABORATION
During the development of our project, and our visit to Monterrey, we realized the many challenges we were facing, given our lack of expertise in the field of protein modeling and the use of databases. However, we were able to overcome these difficulties with the help of our Mexican partners from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Team iGEM-CU helped us to have a better understanding of the main aspects of protein design and how to work with synthetic biology, for all their work and effort helping us, we are deeply grateful.
