From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 19:14, 25 September 2011

ITESM MÉXICO

SensE.coli

We all know that the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. 

Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.

iGEM goal: “Design, build and test biological systems done from interchangeable biological standard parts”.

We could imagine that when the first planners of this contest started this idea, they never thought that this competition will became the most important for undergraduate genetic engineering students from the whole world. We can observe in the following graph the exponential growth of the attendance.

As one of the few Mexican teams that have taken the challenge of attending to this competition, we will create a summary of the Mexican participation on this space:

• The first Mexican team to attend IGEM was the “IGEM Mexico” team (Such a creative name!) in 2006. The team was formed by UNAM and IPN students.

• LCG-UNAM-Mexico participated on iGEM 2008

• Then the UNAM went by itself in 2009

• In 2010 UNAM won a gold medal with “WiFi Coli: A Communicolight System

• ITESM Campus Monterrey 2010 also won a medal the same year

• In 2011 there are a lot more Mexican groups in the competition: ITESM CQ, ITESM MTY, UANL and UNAM

We would like take this chance to tell our story. We are the first generation of biotechnology engineers of ITESM CQ, and in consequence we also were the first group in the campus to try to attend to iGEM. At the beginning we thought that the main concern was to think in a cool iGEM project, but that was only the first step of the road. After several months discussing ideas, we decided to take a well known path to build a biosensor with good improvements. When we finally ended up the theoretical construct, we noticed that we would need a lot of effort in getting the money for the all materials, then when we started obtaining founds we thought that now it was just matter of ordering the strains and the reagents, but we could have never imagined all the adversities that would fall uppon us.

Most materials were not available in Mexico so we had to import almost everything, and it took months; with the strains and plasmids we had serious troubles at the customs office because there wasn’t a defined tax for that kind of products and also because we are only students without any permission to import “that kind of stuff”, so our packages spent weeks waiting for clearance. For example, we received our biobrick kit 4 weeks late and we had to pay 450USD to the customs agents in order to “release” the kits from detention.

<script>(function(d, s, id) {

 var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];
 if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}
 js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;
 js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1";
 fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);

}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));</script>