Oxford Biochemistry Alumni Event @ the Royal Society

Team members Glen Gowers and Philipp Lorenz attended the 2014 London Biochemistry Alumni Event hosted at the Royal Society. The occasion attracted alumni from across a period of more than 50 years – bringing together those who completed their PhDs in the 1950s, with students graduating last year. Following an introduction by Head of Department Mark Sansom and talks from two Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers, our iGEM team members entertained guests with their presentation.

Synthetic Biology: Short Past, Long Future

Oxford iGEM meet up in collaboration with SynOX

On June 19th 2014, the Oxford iGEM team invited all of the teams in the UK and Ireland to the first British and Irish meet-up of 2014. Hosted in the Oxford University Biochemistry Department and co-organised with the Oxford Society for Synthetic Biology (SynOx), the event was attended by 15 iGEM teams as well as Oxford University undergraduates and postgraduates.

The day included three talks about synthetic biology and iGEM:
Dr Jarek Bryk (National Centre for Biotechnology Education, University of Reading – current mentor of Reading iGEM) spoke about what it takes to get synthetic biology incorporated into university teaching and about his dedicated efforts towards establishing the Reading University iGEM team.
The iGEM supervisor’s perspective was presented to us by Dr Richard Kelwick (researcher at the EPSRC National Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation, Imperial College London) along with the lessons he has learned from being a mentor to the past three Imperial College teams.
Last, but certainly not least, Randy Rettberg (Founder and President of the iGEM foundation) imparted to us his vision of synthetic biology as the next revolution in humanity’s technological development.

The talks were filmed to enable a livestream feed of the event to be broadcast live to those unable to attend: even allowing them to be involved in the question and answer session.
Later in the afternoon came the first opportunity for the UK and Irish teams to get to know each other, initially by chatting over sandwiches before moving out of the department to the less formal setting of the pub. To facilitate this discussion the teams had been invited to provide a simple poster to display their main project themes and ideas.

Our thanks to SynOx and to all those who attended! We would like to thank Randy Rettberg, Dr. Richard Kelwick and Dr. Jarek Bryk for their insightful and entertaining talks.

Can you give our cells new instructions? Drop-in Activity

Venue:

A table in the centre of the University Museum of Natural History in Oxford, on a Saturday afternoon. Entrance to the museum is free and members of the public were could approach us and our activities on a drop-in basis.

Audience:

Anyone of any age (babies to pensioners) with a whole range of previous biology experience from none to Biochemistry post docs!

How did we draw them in?

Colourful table display, museum specimens of coral and insects that could be handled by the public, smells people were invited to smell. We also had our table under the T-rex which has a high footfall in the museum.

Activities:

- Can you give our cell new instructions?
Activity inviting people to put ‘when’ and ‘what’ cards together to make ‘new instructions’ for a cell – e.g. putting together ‘LIGHT’ and ‘PINK’ cards to tell a cell express a pink chromoprotein when it senses light. The cards could then be turned over to reveal that this simple genetic circuit was made up of genes/parts of genes from very different kinds of living things e.g. Synechocystis (cyanobacterium), E.coli and Smooth cauliflower coral.

- Handling specimens and objects
Strong smells such as Wintergreen essential oil and vanilla essence invited discussion about using synthetic biology to produce naturally occurring odorants. Coral, firefly and meal worm specimens from the musuem’s collection started discussion about the possible applications of making colourful cells, electricity-free light and antifreeze proteins respectively.

- Bacteria Combat card game
A Top Trumps style card game developed and generously donated by Carla Brown (Glasgow University). The simple game involves cards with information about many different kinds of pathogenic and beneficial bacteria.

Challenge:

A lot of concepts in synthetic biology rely on an understanding of other concepts i.e. DNA, genes and cells. As we had to cater for a range of levels of previous understanding we had to be able to explain these concepts to people (especially children) who had never heard the terms before. Our Solution:
1. Simplify the concept of synthetic biology to exclude a detailed knowledge of genetics – introduce it as moving ‘instructions’ from different living things into other living things in new combinations. E.g. ‘We can take the instruction that makes this coral pink and put it into completely different living thing, a bacterial cell. Now the bacterial cell, which is normally colourless, is the same colour as the coral.’ This could be extended to think about two kinds of instructions; ‘when’ i.e. regulatory components, and ‘what’ i.e. an instruction that tells a cell what to do or what to look like.
2. Have ways of introducing these concepts e.g. describing what bacteria are using the Bacteria Combat card game.

How were we informed by the survey and focus groups?

- Addressing the concern raised in our focus group that the possibilities presented about synthetic biology are ‘over-hyped’ we specifically only used examples of ‘instructions’ that have been submitted as BioBricks to the iGEM registry.
- As anyone could come up to our table we were able to engage older people, a group which our survey shows is more likely to have a lower level of previous knowledge about synthetic biology.

What did we improve for our second go?

We found that people were more interested in the objects and having a discussion than necessarily the ‘Can you give our cells new instructions?’ activity. In fact, this became a good demonstration tool during discussion rather than a starting point for it. For our second event we were also publicised on the museum’s website.

Synthetic Biology and Restriction Enzymes Talk @ Question of Taste Workshop

Audience:

15-20 A2-level Biology students (17-18 years old) and their teachers.

The Brief:

Give 20-25 minute presentation about synthetic biology focusing on molecular biology techniques during the Oxford University Museum of Natural History ‘A Question of Taste’ day-long workshop.

Content:

In the course of the day the students undertook PCR, restriction enzyme digest and gel electrophoresis so we discussed how these techniques could be used in synthetic biology.

We also developed a model of a plasmid and insert to demonstrate complementary ends and the problems with a one enzyme restriction digest and how this can be overcome by a double restriction enzyme digest.

How were we informed by the survey and focus groups?

- Addressing the concern raised in our focus group that the possibilities presented about synthetic biology are ‘over-hyped’ we only gave examples of synthetic biology projects that have been successfully undertaken.
- Included discussion as to why we use antibiotic resistance genes (which in one session lead to a discussion of alternative selectable markers).

What did we improve for our second go?

The second time round added in an animation to show how restriction enzyme sites can be added to a fragment of DNA by PCR.

Introducing iGEM @ the UNIQ Biochemistry Summer School

Audience:

~40 A-level students who are thinking of applying to university to study Biochemistry attending a free residential academic summer-camp.

Content:

Introduction to synthetic biology and the iGEM competition focusing on the competition as a future opportunity for them.

Sheffield iGEM Meet up

The Oxford iGEM team attended the meet up organised by the team at the University of Sheffield on Friday the 18th of July. The purpose of this visit was to continue building the relationships between teams that were started at the Oxford-based meet up in June. The team gave a short presentation on the project so far and had a great time getting to know the Sheffield, York, Kent and UEA-Norwich teams!

YSB 2.0

Glen, Phil and Andy were OxiGEM’s representatives at the YSB 2.0 meet up at the Wellcome Trust and UCL. We were very pleased to be asked to give a workshop to our fellow young synthetic biologists about the issues surrounding intellectual property and iGEM.