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!). 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 our Team Description
The group inscription fee was paid by CeBiB and DIQBT for a total amount of
4000 USD. CeBiB also lent us their laboratories to developthe project and help us with diffusion.
Centre for Biotechnology and Bioengineering (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.
Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology (DIQBT) is part of Faculty of phisics sciences and mathematics (FCFM), Univerisdad de Chile. It teaches two engineering specialities: Chemical and Biotechnological Engineering.
¿How did we obtain this support at the first time?
Ignacio Ardiles and Luis Rodriguez created a Sponsorship letter offering to the institutions being our sponsors. In exchange for their support we offer them:
1.- Team official clothing.
2.- Our official Website and social networks.
3.- 10 cm downside the official poster.
4.- Our Wiki project, actually this part.
Also we will honor our sponsors at the end of our presentation with special mentions. The sponsorship letter is attached at the following link.
After the registration the team set up weekly meetings to plan the work of each week. Also each member of the team has adopted a project area. The distribution of areas was agreed by all members.
We agreed that the responsible of each area will coordinate all the activities of that specific area. However, all team members are responsible for asisting in the areas applying for aid.
Each area has to report their advance and show their main activities for next weeks. With this assigment we are training our leadership and planning skills on each member.
Project areas and responsibles
We received an invitation for a contest conducted by Aplica tu Idea and Fundacion COPEC UC where you can give a short pitch on 3 minutes to present your idea. The first place wins $ 200 to support the project. Despite the price was less than 1% of our budget it was a great oportunity to show our project and get prepaired to next presentations.
Gustavo Calvo was in charge of creating the speech and make the presentation at the headquarters of the Universidad Católica. He obtained the Second place on the contest and was awarded with a special price for the team. Although we did not get 200 dollars, the contest opened our way to make the project better known.
gBlocks were provided by Integrated DNA Technologies . The arrivals means to us that we could finally began to assemble our genetic circuit.
But... Why are important Gblocks?
For every design in synthetic biology, a high fidelity technique is imperative to obtain large fragments of DNA for coding our gene of interest with the regulation elements. The group initially considered obtain the genetic source from the microorgansisms, amplify them and then produce the assemblies by overlap extension PCR. Thanks to gBlocks we could save all this work in laboratory that would require weeks, shipping times of biological material and we would not be able perform codon optimization
Open Beauchef consists of a co-working space (collaborative work) that FCFM facilities. It is located at 851 Avenue Beauchef in the OpenLab. It is designed to create a meeting place for cooperative activities that allow interaction between various innovation actors. It includes students, researchers and developers from every faculty of the Universidad de Chile, together with participants from academia, business, public sector, graduates and investors.
The contact was made first by Severine Cazaux , who tried to contact our Dean Faculty. At first he conducted us to the OpenLab to obtain some team support. They helped us with Mentoring through 2 workshops where we could see our team interests and availability for the project. They also gave us some tasks to gain support on the project: We had to collect 4 interests letters related to our project.
After that and other meetings they wrote a report of the team with the results of the activities. Finally they gave us tips for our team work.
It realy helped us to align all members interests. Also it was our first approachment to our Faculty.
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.
