Team:William and Mary/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
Motivation
This year, our team had the opportunity to share our project with several diverse groups of people: a group of middle school medical explorers, our high school summer interns, and the general public who attended our Building with Biology Public Forum. When connecting with each of these groups we shared the basics behind our project and asked for feedback on our idea as well as general opinions about the work.
Medical Explorers
These students were incredibly excited about the idea of eavesdropping in on cellular conversations. During our discussion some students were interested in the precision of our measurements, equating our “listening in” to the dynamics of signals to a game of telephone where details are lost over time. This gave us the chance to talk about our measurement of florecens and our use of both a flow cytometer and a plate reader. Although a little challenging for the younger age group, several of the students were very excited about the way the machines worked.
The other topic that dominated our conversation were the potential applications. The students wanted to know if we could put our edited bacteria into their bodies and still use the same measurements.
Summer Interns
The high school students working in our lab for the month more deeply involved with our project than any other groups. One of these students in particular, Davis, committed a lot of time to learning about our project, even attending our lab meetings outside of normal wet lab hours. Davis is hoping to study biomedical engineering in college and as a result was very interested in the potential medical applications of our project. His questions pushed us to think about making a more compatible system.
Figure 1: Overview of 3G workflow
Building with Biology
One of our earliest adult outreach programs was our Building with Biology Public Forum. Many adults stayed after the event to hear more about our work as an iGEM team and we were happy to share our project. The Building with Biology Forum had a strong human genome editing theme so many of the participants were primed to think about medical uses for synthetic biology. They were especially interested in the potential for our project to help measure the signals of cancer cells and the ultimate goal of not just interpreting signals but interacting with them.
Impact on Our Project
In all of these conversations there was the common thread of human uses. Our project is designed to interface with natural systems and after hearing the immense interest in implementing this work in humans in particular we began looking for a system which would be compatible with in vivo applications. Eventually we settled on using temperature sensitive systems, as temperature is a property that is easy to control dynamically, and has been shown to be important in the regulation of natural systems such as those involved in bacterial pathogenicity [1] and human immune cell function. Further, the system we chose has been demonstrated to be capable of controlling synthetic circuits in vivo [2].
There are multiple 5’ UNSs and multiple 3’ UNSs, denoted by numbers (ex: UNS 1, UNS 3, UNS 10). This allows us to combine multiple fragments in the Gibson step.