Design intention
Fangfei Ye (YFF)
I’m the art designer of our team, mainly responsible for graphic design. I think the best kind of design is to show the project faithfully.
Tian Huang (HT)
I’m the wiki designer of our team, mainly responsible for wiki design. I’d like to tell you the story behind the design.
How were the colors chosen?
YFF: I used tuned orange, yellow and blue for the logo for three reasons. First, they are bright attractive colors, giving people a fresh and lively feeling. Second, they represent three different cells. Third, these three colors were mixed with a bit of grey to give a balanced effect. This symbolizes that synthetic biology not only relies on biological experiments, but also requires contributions various other fields such as computer science, mathematics, sociology, etc.
Logo design
YFF: I designed the logo to reflect the focus of our project: transmembrane signaling. I used three polygons to represent three cells, with two on the left providing signals to the cell on the right. I also used curved corners on some regions to indicate where two adjacent cells contact. Furthermore, I used two bold arrow lines to emphasize that the signals are transduced from the left to the right. Finally, the arrangement of the arrowheads with our project name suggests that the signals are integrated to generate the output. Overall, my design utilizes simple and clean displays to allow anyone to understand it easily and instantly!
Bio-Art display
(see our detailed page for Bio-Art Display)
YFF: I am wholly responsible for the Bio-Art Exhibition of Engagement and Public Education, which combines synthetic biology and art to engage the public in understanding synthetic biology and our projects.
In fact, Display is something initially very difficult for me, because I had very limited experience. I would like to thank the designers of Team 2017 Fudan and Team 2017 iGEM Fudan-China for their help and advice. Without their help, I couldn’t hold such a beautiful display. To make the exhibition look attractive, I also inquired my friends who major in the exhibition design, and they all gave me constructive advice.
To help the audience navigate the Display, there are a lot of humanized details in the exhibition. For example, we designed small note papers, on which the audience can write down their thoughts at any time throughout the display. In each exhibition area, there are always our team members present to help explain the project and also communicate with the audience. We also carefully designed the guidebook, which provides a brief explanation of the contents of the exhibition to help the audience have a better understanding.
wiki design
HT: I made this wiki template for Team:Fudan based on Materialize.
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There are many useful features you should know on this wiki website:
- On most sites, a page navigator was added on the right side of main content as a quick guide of the page; you can find related links in this navigator
- The wiki displays well on either large screen devices (such as laptops) or small ones (such as mobile phones)
- The wiki is made to be print-friendly
- Footer contains the sitemap of our wiki, making it easy to surf to anywhere
- A yellow abstract button can be found at the lower right corner of the screen, clicking that will display the abstract of our project ENABLE
- Pages use cookie to record the positions; when you open the same page on the same device again, it will resume to where you previously were
Abstract
Contact-dependent signaling is critical for multicellular biological events, yet customizing contact-dependent signal transduction between cells remains challenging. Here we have developed the ENABLE toolbox, a complete set of transmembrane binary logic gates. Each gate consists of 3 layers: Receptor, Amplifier, and Combiner. We first optimized synthetic Notch receptors to enable cells to respond to different signals across the membrane reliably. These signals, individually amplified intracellularly by transcription, are further combined for computing. Our engineered zinc finger-based transcription factors perform binary computation and output designed products. In summary, we have combined spatially different signals in mammalian cells, and revealed new potentials for biological oscillators, tissue engineering, cancer treatments, bio-computing, etc. ENABLE is a toolbox for constructing contact-dependent signaling networks in mammals. The 3-layer design principle underlying ENABLE empowers any future development of transmembrane logic circuits, thus contributes a foundational advance to Synthetic Biology.