We are participating in the iGEM competition for the first time, so our project's beginning story intersects with our team story. Therefore, we will tell you how it all started... through people.
Throughout the season, we had meetings with experts and stakeholders who gave us feedback on critical points of our project and made us re-evaluate and modify our design and strategy. Besides helping us build our project, these integrated human practices also enabled us to form our team when we didn't have one yet.
Patrick Squizato
We first heard about iGEM and synthetic biology through the UNESP team, of which Patrick was a member. One of our team members is a friend of Patrick and asked him for suggestions on how to learn synthetic biology and how to participate in iGEM. In addition to giving us many tips on places to learn synbio, Patrick suggested we talk to Guilherme Kundlatsch
Guilherme Kundlatsch
In a biotechnology event at UNILA, Guilherme gave us a lecture on iGEM and several workshops on synthetic biology. His visit was the spark we needed for students and professors to team up and do synthetic biology in our university
Good ideas come with coffee
Matheus, Samuel, Maria, and Giulio (founding members) gathered at a coffee shop to decide which strategy to take to learn synthetic biology at UNILA: Join IGEM or start a synthetic biology club? "Why not both?" And that was how the preparations for what is now SynFronteras.TEAM and SynFronteras.CLUB began
Kelvinson Viana
When we were looking for local problems to solve with synbio, one of the factors we took into account was having an expert in leishmaniasis at our university. Professor Kelvinson, our secondary PI, shaped several stages of our project. One of the main tips he gave us was that the prevention of leishmaniasis is a critical factor in fighting the disease, which made us work hard to develop a strategy for that.
Eric Velasco
USP_Brazil had a project with paratransgenesis in 2017 and Eric, a former UNILA student now doing a master's degree at USP, introduced us to this technique. From the conversation with Eric and from reading the BioTROJAN's project wiki (USP-Brazil 2017), we fell in love with paratransgenesis and decided that this was what we would put our efforts on.
Cristian Rojas
Cristian is our molecular biology teacher and was one of the professors who attended Guilherme's lecture and got excited about synbio and iGEM. We invited him to become our PI, he accepted and shaped our project in different areas, the most important one being the suggestion to test our circuit in E. coli before moving on to Bacillus subtilis. We count on his experience and support throughout the project.
André Herman
In the beginning, we had no idea how to start a synthetic biology club. André was one of those responsible for giving us the foundation with which we shaped our club. He was one of the founders of the synbio club of the USP-EEL-Brazil team.
Renata Defante & Giselli Kurtz
The Zoonoses Control Center (CCZ) of Foz do Iguaçu is responsible for identifying cases of canine visceral leishmaniasis in our city. With the help of Renata and Giseli, we realized that the disease cases were underreported, which served as inspiration for creating the fighting underreporting subproject.
NGO Amigo Peludo (Furry Friend)
Sandra and Jucie are the leaders of the NGO Amigo Peludo, our supporter. At the NGO, they take care of several dogs with leishmaniasis, and they were essential for us to understand the role of those who struggle for a long time with the disease. They also influenced our social media communication. They warned us that we had to be careful about how we talked about VL, because there are several cases of people abandoning their dogs on the streets as soon as they discover the disease. Because of that, awareness of the disease's dangers would have to be done coupled with instructions on how to treat the infected animal and an explanation that the dog does not directly transmit the disease to humans.
Guilherme Brand
Our AMP (effector molecule) is naturally produced by a frog, and Professor Guilherme Brand characterized this molecule. We had a chance to talk to him and get feedback on our circuit design and AMP choice. We chose the AMP that was most toxic to Leishmania and least toxic to bacteria (you can find out more about this choice here, but he warned us that the AMP would probably be toxic to our chassis no matter what. We asked if he had any tips on how to produce our AMP in a non-toxic form and activate it later. He replied that this is exactly what the frog does and suggested we search for the acidic piece that is produced fusioned with the AMP (More information on how we inserted the acidic piece into our construct here.
José Marcelo Ramalho-Ortigão
Professor Marcelo was one of the authors of the chapter "Paratransgenic Control of Leishmaniasis: New Developments" present in the book Pathogenesis of Leishmaniasis, which served as the basis for our research. He kindly accepted to be our advisor and had an influence on several changes to our project. He suggested using sugar baits to spread the engineered bacteria to the sandflies and trypsin to activate our AMP. To demonstrate this activation, he instructed us to perform an assay to verify trypsin's proteolytic cleavage on our AMP with different concentrations of trypsin.
Tiago Lubiana
The USP_Brazil 2017 team was a great inspiration for our project, and Tiago was a team member. Today, he is our advisor and pointed out to us that we would need to do something for Bacillus to withstand the environmental variations in sugar baits. The sporulation mechanism can be an advantage in this regard, so we will maintain the bacteria in this stage until it reaches the sandfly midgut. To learn more about this strategy, click here.
Vanete Soccol
Professor Vanete Soccol is a reference in the study of VL in our region. We were honored to have a meeting with her. She indicated to us the places in our city with the highest incidence of the disease and how her research is strong evidence that there is underreporting of VL cases in Foz do Iguaçu. That conversation shaped the way we built the fighting underreporting subproject.
Oscar Salomón & Angélica Pech May
Dr. Salomón and Dr. Angélica are from the National Institute of Tropical Medicine (INMET) in Puerto Iguazú, a city in Argentina that borders Foz do Iguaçu. We had the opportunity to present our project to these two notable researchers and get feedback on it. During the meeting, they approached the unspecificity of sugar baits (many insects consume glucose and could be off-targets, such as Apis mellifera), which reinforced our need to find a specific strategy for detection, such as our detection module. You can see more about the module here
Margareth Capurro-Guimarães
Currently, there is no product on the market that uses paratransgenesis, but there are close alternatives to which we can relate our project, such as transgenic mosquitoes. Professor Margareth is one of Brazil's leading experts on the subject, and we had the chance to present our work for her and receive feedback at a meeting. She suggested several implementation strategies, the main one being a physical barrier so that other insects could not enter our sugar bait. More details here.
