Team:The Tech Museum/Summary

Executive Summary

The Tech Museum of Innovation is a science and technology center located in San Jose, California. Our mission is to inspire the innovator in everyone! This year, we are trying to do just that with synthetic biology through our participation in iGEM!

This is the first time a museum has entered the iGEM competition. We are excited to prototype new ways in which we, as an institution, can offer novel activities to excite and educate our community. Therefore, the starting goal of our project was to create an interactive museum exhibit to engage the public in synthetic biology. Can we promote public interest in and understanding of synthetic biology through a hands-on engineering of bacteria and data collection experience?

Importantly, we want to allow people of all ages and with no biology background to partake in the activity and become part of our museum iGEM team. To tackle these goals, we developed an interactive activity where visitors are involved in both making and analyzing multi-colored bacteria.

The first step towards creating this exhibit was to build the necessary tools. This included both biological tools as well as software ones.

On the biology side, we had to design and build the DNA instructions for making rainbow colored bacteria. To do this, we created a ‘soup’ of many different circular pieces of DNA (called plasmids). Each plasmid contains the genes that make fluorescent red, yellow, and blue color proteins. To each of these color genes, we randomly attached another piece of DNA that controls how much color protein is made (called promoters). We used a set of nine promoters with varying strengths: some make a lot of color protein while others make very little. This design strategy should randomize the relative levels of red, yellow, and blue produced by each unique piece of DNA. When these plasmids are individually inserted into bacteria, the final bacterial colony hue should represent a particular combination of color protein concentrations. This is similar to how an RGB computer screen operates. Thus, we are effectively creating bacterial ‘pixels!’

Biology, however, is not quite as straightforward as an LED, since we are dealing with living things. DNA instructions can be read or interpreted differently in different biological contexts. And, this can sometimes dramatically modify the output of those instructions. So, although we designed a pool of plasmids that should be capable of making close to 750 different colors, does this actually happen? Do some promoter-color combinations always fail? Do others dominate? Are there colony hues that are never seen? Seen repeatedly?

To help us answer these questions, we created another set of tools on the software side of things. We developed software to image, analyze, quantify the multi-colored bacteria colonies produced by our plasmid pools. This software combines imaging and computer vision strategies to detect and analyze bacteria colonies on a petri dish. The color results from each plate being analyzed are dynamically displayed on the screen, as are other fun statistics like the rare bacteria colors discovered by each visitor and the names of those colors!

Next, we integrated these new tool into a physical exhibit to create a hands-on synthetic biology experience. Museum visitors contribute to our project at two different stages. First, they insert the DNA instructions for making random colors into bacteria and grow them. This results in a rainbow of bacteria growing their plate! Hundreds of different colors are potentially possible. Then, they use our software tools at the ‘bacteria photobooth’ station to analyze the colony colors on plates from previous days.

When a visitor finishes analyzing their plate, a large-scale dynamic visualization showing our team’s collective color data is updated in real time. This allows people to appreciate their personal contribution to our iGEM project and see how their data fits into the groups as a whole. Thus, any museum visitor who wants can become a citizen scientist and help us discover bacteria colors. Over time, our aggregate results will give insight into the variety and frequency bacteria colors that are produced by the pools of DNA that we built.

We spent several weeks on the museum floor engaging visitors with evolving prototypes of our hands-on exhibit. These interactions provided us with valuable feedback from users about their experience and helped us make both design and content improvements.

Altogether, our iGEM team of museum visitors analyzed a total of 2674 colonies of bacteria on 61 different petri dishes. Together, we found a total of 324 unique colors!

We hope to continue using our iGEM project as a vehicle for exposing people to the excitement and power of synthetic biology.