Beginning
The Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA) is a new university founded in 2010, which seeks to bring together students from different parts of Latin America. That is, we are a genuinely Latin American university. The graduation course in Biotechnology was founded in 2015. And in this scenario, we face the initial challenges of creating new research areas in the Biotechnology field at our institution, such as the lack of infrastructure and reagents. However, the motivation of students and teachers work as gears to overcome barriers and promote quality teaching and research daily.
Synthetic biology arrived at our institution recently and inspired students to "make biology easier to engineer". This motivation came with the presentation and workshops of Guilherme Kundlatsch, Alina Rodrigues, and Marcelo de Souza in 2019. After all, how can you not get inspired knowing that it is possible to engineer a bacteria to produce spider silk?
At that time, the challenge of setting up a line of research or working in the area during undergraduation was far from being realized. It would require more people and resources. Therefore, we decided to go down a path where learning and execution would go hand in hand. At worst results, we would learn synthetic biology anyway, and at best, we could learn synthetic biology and encourage other students or even make synthetic biology for everyone. Then, we founded the SynFronteras.Team. (recognized here as UNILA_LatAm) our synthetic biology research group at UNILA, and the SynFronteras.Club, our space for discussion and synthetic biology presentations.
SynFronteras.Club
In 2020, the SynFronteras.Club was created to introduce Synbio to Biotechnology undergraduate students at the Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA). The Bachelor in Biotechnology - UNILA currently has 190 students from 13 Latin American countries (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala). Based on this composition, the Club's main objective was to discuss the advances of Latin American professionals and iGEM teams and highlight the different research contexts with biotechnology and synthetic biology in Latin America. Over time, the Club implemented two formats, the first with only meetings and debates. The second made it possible to record the classes and make them available on youtube for the general public, providing audiovisual material on synthetic biology in Portuguese and Spanish (See here). The meetings promoted debates around new tools, methods, and possibilities with synthetic biology. Among the listeners, we had students from UNILA and eleven other Brazilian and foreign institutions. In addition, the meetings allowed us to spread the word of synbio and to gather more members to the SynFronteras Team (iGEM UNILA LatAm). Check out some of the flyers of the meeting we had.
Survey to measure the level of perception of Foz do Iguaçu citizens about Visceral Leishmaniasis
The SynFronteras team decided to develop a project linked to paratransgenesis and the control of Canine Visceral Leishmaniasis (CVL) and chose to do a public research to investigate the level of awareness of the city of Foz do Iguaçu-PR about this disease. Such data were essential to analyze how much the local population has been instructed about CVL, whether it knows the main means of disease transmission, and whether it is aware of the preventive care it requires, whether in humans or animals. The questionnaire was composed of nine questions, available in Portuguese and Spanish since our university is an institution based on Latin American Integration.
Here we have highlighted a brief summary of the survey main results:
Graph 1: You can see that more than half of the target audience of our research has knowledge about VL.