Our vision
Mexico is one of the top 10 economies in the world; however, its scientific advance grows very slowly, and we are staying behind, especially if we want to compete against other countries. This is why iGEM Team Tec-Monterrey 2015 strives to help synthetic biology grow; not only in our state, but also throughout our country. We believe that by being young people, we have a higher outreach, and can really make a change by letting other people know about synthetic biology and everything you can achieve with it. In this way we make our colleagues, family and citizens more aware of synthetic biology, creating a higher interest.
One of the main reasons that made us use the Sf9 cell line was because there isn’t a lot of research about it, and we believe that it has great potential in the future for the making of proteins and other uses. With our project, we hope that other scientists can use our insect cell platform to carry out new research, thus allowing the field to reach new heights. We want to facilitate the use of this cells to other iGEM Teams and hopefully scientists outside of iGEM, by characterizing certain parts and leaving a little more research than there was before. We believe that in the future this cell line will be really helpful and have a greater impact in synthetic biology.
Gene Us
We created a strategic alliance with a social entrepreneurship called “GeneUs”. GeneUs needed help to guide middle school students that were doing projects in Biotechnology to in a Science Fair as a conclusion to workshops given during the previous weeks. The role of our team was to guide the students while they were developing their respective projects. At the end, the students were very happy with the results and everything they learned during the process. As a team, we felt really satisfied to be able to teach students more about what we are passionate so they can consider it as an option for their professional careers in the future and to help increase the development of Biotechnology in Mexico.
Social media
To let the world know about our project, achievements, events and progress, we made a great use of social media. By having 1729 likes on our Facebook page and 546 followers on Twitter we are sure that people believe in our project and are interested in knowing about it. This is why we did our best job in demonstrating our moments of excitement when parts arrived, bonding time with other iGEM Teams and interesting articles that involve biotechnology, so people can be more informed about the great impact it has. We also submitted a video at www.idea.me to help us raise funds for our project and took advantage of our outreach for promotion. Social media is a really important tool nowadays to reach people with different interests and all around the world, such as other iGEM Teams.
You can find us in the following websites:
