Team:UNICAMP-Brazil/HumanPractices

Biofuels and land use: a synthetic biology perspective
As CO2 levels in the atmosphere reach alarming levels and the world looks for possible solutions, one of the greatest debates has centered on whether the widespread growth of biomass for biofuels will compete with the land needed to feed our growing world population. Click here to read more.

Click here to see the results of our survey.

CAEB
Biennially, Unicamp´s biology students organize a conference called CAEB, which gathers biology students from all over the country. This year about 1,200 undergraduate students participated in the conference, which happened from July 27th to July 31st

We decided to use this opportunity to make a lecture to divulge our IGEM team´s project to the students, and share what we´ve been learning about synthetic biology with them. Most of them had never heard about synthetic biology or iGEM before. It was a really good experience to us, since the students enjoyed our presentation. We hope some of them subscribe an iGEM team to next year´s jamboree in order to make Brazilian´s participation higher in the competition.

Creation of a new undergraduate course
Another significant result of the particpation of team UNICAMP-Brazil in iGEM 2009 is the creation of a new undergraduate course for the Biology curriculum at UNICAMP: BG585 "Introduction to Systems and Synthetic Biology". From this course new generations of team UNICAMP-Brazil will arise for continued participation at iGEM, and, most importantly, will contribute to spread the knowledge of synthetic biology among Brazilian Biology students. To our knowledge, this is the first undergraduate course in synthetic biology in Brazil. Thank you iGEM!