Team:UCSF UCB/hp.html

From 2014.igem.org

The Science behind the Fiction at San Francisco’s Exploratorium

Shuaxin explains cloning

For our Human Practices, we decided to take a fun and exciting approach to inspire public dialogue about synthetic biology. This summer, just as our iGEM 2013 team did the previous year, we coordinated with the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum based in San Francisco, to present an exhibit at their “Science Fiction” themed After Dark event. With the opportunity to present to several thousand attendees, we prepared various materials that introduced synthetic biology in a novel and fun way – through comic book superheroes!

In our presentation, titled “Super Science: The Genetics Behind Superheroes,” we put a superhero spin on the topic of synthetic biology in order to excite people about the largely unknown and growing field. To do so, our presentation discussed the validity and possibility of specific superhero powers such as Spiderman’s spider silk, Hulk’s super strength, and Flash’s super speed, based on existing genes and techniques available to scientists today. We also mentioned our day-to-day lab work that included these techniques, such as the cloning genes.

When guests first reached our booth, we primed them with background information about the world of synthetic biology, its applications, and how it exists in our everyday lives. As an example of what synthetic biology is capable of, we brought culture plates of yeast cells that contained isolated genes from the violacein pathway. This allows us to demonstrate a fundamental principle of synthetic biology: we can take genes from one organism and express them in another.

Sabrina draws another superhero!

In our second station, guests could engineer their own superhero! They had two choices before them: 1). To “use synthetic biology” and engineer pre-formed superpowers into their genome, or 2) to try their hand at random mutations through exposure to radioactive waste or random DNA mutagenesis. This second option mostly led them through a range of unexpected consequences from silent mutations, to cancer, to third-degree burns, and even death, with the rare exception of a favorable mutation. Our pre-formed superpowers were inspired by genes found in other animals like super strong spider silk and tardigrade invincibility.

In our third station, our caricature artist, Sabrina, hand-drew guests with their favorite superpowers!

Super Curriculum

From our crowd appeal at the Exploratium, we were encouraged to expand our message. We have developed and are now freely distributing a synthetic biology curriculum.

With this curriculum, we wish to teach middle school (and high school) aged students about genetics, synthetic biology, and genetic engineering through the frame of superheroes. This twist to such a broad and intricate field will hopefully introduce students to synthetic biology as well as excite a new generation of researchers.

Below, you can find links to all the materials used in our presentation and activities:

We hope that you will find presenting this material as fun and interesting as we did. Please share and distribute widely.

Collaborators

Reagents & Project Support

University of Nevada, Reno

We helped the Nevada iGEM team set up their yeast-based project by sending them yeast strains (W303 and S288C backgrounds) and shuttle vectors for cloning in both E. coli and yeast. We also helped them troubleshoot expression issues they had in their yeast strains, and as a solution, we provided them a construct we generated with the promoter pTEF1 (BBa_K319003, our characterized and sequence-verified version) driving GFP expression.

Cornell University

When Cornell’s iGEM team wanted water samples for filtration, we sent them 50ml of water from Berkeley’s Strawberry Creek.

iGEM Newsletter

Paris-Bettencourt's iGEM team decided to publish an iGEM newsletter, and we participated by providing summaries and updates of our project for Newsletters 2-4, as well as answering many of the other teams' questions. You can view the Newsletters here: Issue 2, Issue 3, and Issue 4.

Surveys Completed

  • Ben Gurion
  • Virtus Parva
  • ETH Zurich
  • Valencia Biocampus
  • Paris-Saclay
  • WLC-Milwaukee
  • BIT-China