Integrated
Expert advice
This year, as we begun designing our project we decided to ask for the experts advice on two big issues: experimental design and human practices itself.
Experts on experimental design
We talked with a panel of Professors from the Biomedical Sciences Institute about our experimental design, with whom we discussed the magnitude of our project, its basic experimental concepts and its possible uses inside microbiology labs.
From this panel, emerged our connection with Professor Marilis do Valle Marques, who sat down with us and helped us choose our E. coli strains. The most significant contribution to our design came with the Professors’ validation of our idea to normalize our results with the CFP fluorescence, therefore allowing us to have more precise and reproducible data.
Experts on human practices
Parallel to that, we sat down with the founder of “Projeto Adote”, Professor Rita de Cássia Café Ferreira, with whom we talked about the difficulty in integrating basic research with people outside the academic community and how to attract the interest of younger generation, so that they will consider this path. She gave us some ideas and valuable advice on how to teach basic microbiology, based on her extensive experience in Brazil’s public schools.
On top of that, we had several meetings with Professor Ana Márcia de Sá Guimarães and the staff of project “Biocientista Mirim” who helped us with our teaching skills, so that we could actually make the biggest part of our integrated human practices proposal work: This year, the execution of our project counted with the help of an all-female group students from Brazil’s Technical high school.
All-female group of students from Brazils Technical School
Early on, we realized that the upside of developing a foundational advances project was that we could use it to open the door to synthetic biology to people who otherwise wouldn't know about it, nor have the opportunity to be a indispensable part of a synbio project. To that end, when we were given the opportunity to work with Dani, La and Elo, a group of students, we integrated them in our project, teaching them about basic microbiology, synthetic biology and lab work. They are high school seniors, attending a public full-time technical school, graduating with a technical degree in Chemistry. They approached Professor Guimarães with the intent to develop their senior project in a microbiology lab on the University of São Paulo, but they still hadn't decided which one. Thinking that our team's approach would be a perfect fit for them, Professor Guimarães introduced the two groups and they soon became part of the team.
Left to right: Felipe, Elo, Dani, La and Vinicius
They helped to develop the constructs of the Las quorum sensing Sender system and in teaching them we were forced to think about how our project fits the world and its importance and how to make it accessible for everyone. To our great delight, our effort to bring more people to work on science, especially synthetic biology paid out, and the girls plan to attend university at Biology or Biomedical sciences institute, to pursue a research career.
Some of the things we teached them about were the workings of genes, plasmids and molecular biology's basic principles, E. coli cultivation in non-selective and selective media, bacterial transformation, gene editing techniques, plasmidial DNA extraction and finally how to see DNA through agarose gel electrophoresis.
As we do not cover this topics normally in Brazillian high school, the girls ended up reporting to us how much they had learned and how they were slowly approaching the subjects we covered in their classes. As this knowledge is also the mainframe of what you need for an iGEM project, we might as well be seeing the birth of the first brazillian iGEM high school team! We would've absolutely loved for them to be able to attend the Giant Jamboree, but with their finals and University exams coming closer and closer, they''l have to for next year's!
Their integration into the team was especially rewarding when we face the fact that we are are severely gender unbalenced team and it was important to us that we help close this gap, which we hopefully achieved by bringing more women into STEM careers.