Team:CIDEB-UANL Mexico/Team-Origins

How it all started...

We are the second team from our high school (CIDEB) ever to participate in the iGEM contest. Last year’s team, after obtaining the principal’s authorization, introduced the opportunity of being part of this year’s team to our generation. Eighteen members were selected out of a group of students who were interested in being part of the team and after having attended a series of courses to have background knowledge in microbiology and synthetic biology. Our school doesn’t teach these topics, so it was something beyond regular classes. Anyone could attend these courses, but the team was limited to a number of 20 students.

In September, 2013, the school invited all 3th semester students to participate in a selection in order to create IGEM-CIDEB 2013. A big conference was planned and a lot of students went in order to know a more about the contest and Synthetic Biology.

The filters consisted in 2 phases. The first one was a series of classes with information about Synthetic Biology during the months of October and November. The classes were given by 2 last year’s teams’ instructors. In these classes, each week was a topic was taught regarding Synthetic Biology and an assignment for each topic was sent as homework dew the next session.

The second phase was a workshop in the laboratory with hands-on practices such as transformation, miniPreparation of DNA plasmidic, electrophoresis and some others, during the second week of January 2013. Based on the participation, assistance and compromise, the final team was selected.