Team:USP-EEL-Brazil/Partnership
iGEM USP Brazil and USP-EEL Brazil teams have established a partnership to help each other achieve their projects' full potential. The partnership has extended to several fronts in order to achieve the goal.
In the first quarter of the year both projects were in their beginning stages, the leaders of both teams held a meeting and discussed the organization, objective and challenges of the teams. Then a partnership was established and an exchange of experiences that continued until the completion of both projects.
In the various meetings we had we exchanged information about modeling. At the beginning of the project we had great difficulties with our modeling, once we were developing familiarity with this area of knowledge, because of the COVID-19 pandemic we could not perform experiments to validate our hypotheses and we did not find the necessary data in the literature. USP-Brazil team was essential to leverage our modeling, through long conversations we found out how to better explore the data we had to reach a model that we considered ideal.
The insights and advice given to USP-EEL team were essential for the team to understand the real meaning of mathematical modeling and how it could be done within the context of synthetic biology applied to the problem at hand. Programming issues in some languages such as python and pymol were taken into consideration in the choice of software in which we used to determine the solutions of our systems. Moreover, the help in relation to the software used was not limited to kinetic modeling but was of immense importance so that we could obtain structural models of the target protein.
This partnership was not limited to modeling, our conversations also addressed the social part of our projects. We discussed how we can impact society and receive feedback in the best possible way. This helped us to achieve a better approach with the students participating in the Synthetic Biology Tournament. We passed the feedback to USP-Brazil team so they could apply it to their Science Camp.
In our Education and Communication actions we promoted the Let.It.Bee project in order to demonstrate to young people the power of Brazilian science.
