Community Outreach

In order to present synthetic biology and molecular biology to the local students living within the tri-state area, we prepared presentations about our projects for The Cooper Union's Summer STEM high school students. This year's summer STEM program involved high school students who have a passion for science and technology. Cooper Union's annual program has over a hundred students participating in a wide variety of engineering projects during an intensive six week summer stretch.

The group with which our IGEM team interacted with comprised of sixteen talented high school students that elected to participate in the "IGEM" component of the Cooper Union summer STEM program. Here they spent the summer designing, building and testing variations of the "BioHacker Kit" platform technology that our undergraduate IGEM team independently worked on. The high school students were arranged in 4 teams of Team "A", Team "T", Team "G" and Team "C". During the summer STEM program each team worked on developing a different INPUT and OUTPUT plasmid component, to function as modular biosensors. The STEM teams worked on an arsenic detector, a quorum sensing system, a glucose sensor and an arabinose inducible system to make bacteria turn yellow and smell like bananas.The high school STEM teams then got a chance to interact and learn about the parallel projects being worked on simultaneously by our Cooper Union IGEM team members during their presentations, resulting in a truly immersive experience!

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De novo Synthesizer

For De Novo Synthesizer project, we presented a brief introduction to our research, which is about creating a novel microfluidic platform for DNA synthesis that allows people to synthesize a personalized strand of DNA in lab without use of a template strand. Along with the timelines of experiments and research process, we also provided with background information about enzyme kinetics and activities. To help them understand the concepts better, we let them to mimic enzymatic activities by transferring small candies to a different container. Using different tools and methods that aids or prevents transferring, students were able to understand the concepts of enzyme kinematics including the characteristics of enzyme, conformational changes, and influence of inhibitors and activators. Students actively participated, came up with novel ideas of possible conformational changes, and asked interesting questions. You can download our presentation here and a copy of our activity here.

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Programmable Lifespan Timer

The Programmable Lifespan Timer project aims to create a “kill switch" for cells used in production. In the case that these cells leave the lab environment, they will die after a set amount of time, preventing the release of unwanted chemicals into the environment, or mating with wild type organisms.

In our presentation to the Cooper Union Summer STEM students, we explained the significance of telomeres and telomerase in yeast, as well as our experimentation in gene deletion. Our activity incorporated Twizzlers, which represented various telomere lengths. The "telomeres" had different lengths due to different gene knockouts. The intention of the activity was to convey the idea that chromatids with longer telomeres would live longer in comparison to those with shorter telomeres.

We also discussed senescence in yeast cells in the absence of telomerase, and described how the cells could recover with a backup mechanism called homologous recombination. A growth curve showing the cell density of yeast as it underwent senescence over time was displayed. We wrapped up the presentation with a fun word search that reinforced main ideas. You can download our presentation here.