Team:UPO-Sevilla/Human Practice

For its second year, the UPO-Sevilla team participates on the international Synthetic Biology competition iGEM. Synthetic biology is a new and exciting discipline of science that puts together computing, engineering and molecular biology with the goal of designing and constructing biological machines: living organisms with the ability to perform new and useful tasks. The iGEM contest is an initiative that hosts undergraduate student teams from all over the world to develop new biological designs, work on them over the summer and present them in the iGEM Jamborees.

UPO-Sevilla was the pioneer Andalusian team to participate in the iGEM competition last year. The UPO-Sevilla team is has grown from six students and two supervisors in 2010 to ten students and seven supervisors in 2011. This year's team hosts a mixture of computer science, engineering, biotechnology, genetics, physiology and microbiology students and professors. This multidisciplinary team is working hard on the Flashbacter project, aimed to develop biological machines able to store information, much like a computer's memory does. Find more details on this in the Project section.

In addition to research, the UPO-Sevilla team has undertaken during this year an active diffusion program to promote awareness of Synthetic biology, especially among younger students in Andalucía including seminars, workshops, and the first blog in spanish devoted to Synthetic biology, Tornillos y genes.