At that time there was an organized group from Universidad de Chile called OpenBio. That team was funded on December 2013 by Luis Rodriguez and Pablo Troncoso (we miss you!), then other people joined the team and our teacher Alvaro Olivera supported us from the beginning. Organization’s main objectives are:
1.- Boosting Synthetic Biology in Chile.
2.- Development of low cost Biotechnologies machines.
3.- Periodically attendance to the iGEM Competition.
The group used to participate in different activities in university to spread synthetic biology through workshops and informative talks.
Thanks to the activities that the group developed and others that were attended by them, was possible to contact with people interested in being part of the project and very committed to the tasks involved in developing it.
Finally we formed the Team iGEM Uchile-OpenBio, we all feel part of the team and if you want to know more about the members of the team we invite you to see Team Description
CeBiB is a center of excellence in frontier research by an interdisciplinary team composed of renowned national and international, able to investigate key issues of modern biotechnology and bioengineering, including important applications in industry.
We have achieved from a multidisciplinary team for our project. The team is composed by Engineering students, Industrial Designer and Journalist.
We were announced that UChile OpenBio got 2° Award Competition for Innovative Ideas & Technology Copec-UC Foundation and StgoLabSpace. The award generated significant project visibility.
The gBlocks are pieces of DNA around 500 pb long, so if you have gens of around 1Kb, you will have to link two gBlocks. For link gBocks, we use the Gibson Assembly technique.
The gBlocks arrived means to us that we could finally began to assemble our genetic circuit.
We participate of a sessions for guide and empower our project.
The development of entrepreneurial skills in the team was supported of OpenLab Beauchef. We participate in workshops innovation and entrepreneurship. It was a strategic stakeholder for the team.
On August 2015 ICEI Ingeniería y construcción Ltda. (Silver Sponsor) funded 1695 USD for 1 plane tickets and 1 registration fee. They also supported us with the purchase process.
On 13 August 2015 the team presented our iGEM competition Brochure to Juan Asenjo, director of CeBiB our actual partner. They Supported us with 5.000.000 CLP, (7309 USD at the time). This helped us to pay about 50% of the accommodation payment, 2 more plane tickets for the rest of the team and 3 inscription fee.
CONICYT (Research, Science and Technology National Commission) Conicyt provided us for 4 event fee payments. We were visited this governmental organization during 4 months to look for financial support. At June we got its support. The support at this contest is around $2570 USD (Silver Sponsor).
“Silence is the element in which all great things are formed”
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
Sigma-Aldrich provided us for the laboratory reagents around USD $1900 (Golden Sponsor).
It was very important to decrease the time to providing reagents for project.
Attach archive Sponsorship Invoice.
We reached the goal of 3715 USD (Silver Sponsor). It was very important to support 4 ticket travel. We used Fondeadora crowfunding page because it is a easy donate way, we had contact direct to support and confidence in Chile, they are a rising platform in Latinoamerica. Unfortunatly, they were slow to give us the money.
We use the support of IDT(Golden Sponsor) to the iGEM’s teams for synthesize the biobricks that we used in our proyect. This biobricks came in the format of gBlocks.
Finaly on 10 August we made our budget and we were ready to present it to interested Organizations. At that date we had covered 43% of the total expenses.
