Team:SCUT-China B/HP/HP3
A.To be a voluntary teacher: Bring science to children in the country.
One of our team members Yang Yanxia went to Heyuan Guangdong province where was quite undeveloped and had lack of ides of science. She gave lesson on biology to make children there to get interested in biology and science and finally spread the idea science there.
The lesson was consist of microorganisms, gene engineering and a brief introduction of our iGEM project. First we taught them about microorganisms and showed an interesting micro world and the relationship with our life. What’s more,we brought a microscope to the school in order to let them have a vivid experience about the microorganism.They were excited to see the strange instrument which they had never seen. It was nice to see the children’s face with curiosity and joy when they exploring the new world in microscope.
The second part of our class was about gene engineering. We told them the concept and the aim of gene engineering and showed them some imaginary image of gene engineering such as cow which can produce milk with photosynthesis and plants which can produce potatoes and tomatoes at the same time. Amused by the interesting imagination, they began to draw their own picture of the world with gene engineering in their mind as well as ask for more images. The images really fuelled their imagination and we hoped these stimulating imagination in the future world with development of science and technology can stir up their interest to science.
Finally, we showed an animation that we adjusted from Big Hero 6 to introduce our iGEM project. Different roles in the movie represented different biological elements in our project and we told a story to explain process of our project. Children there were so interested in it and kept asking us questions about the animation and our project.
The children were too young to understand everything we taught in the class but we were happy to see the children were so interested in science. We believe that interest is always the best teacher. We hope with the teacher of interest can lead more and more children to learn science and finally to spread the idea of science in the country.
B.Sino-USA Chinese Collaboration Workshop
On 30th June SCUT held Sino-USA Chinese Collaboration Workshop which ended on 3rd July along with Tianjin University, Tsinghua University and Nanjing University of Technology. The workshop was held for experts from different universities to discuss about the meaning of synthetic biology and the trend of the development of it. We also hope that this workshop can make more students to have a deeper understanding to synthetic biology and its usage and therefor make them to be more interested in the subject and to generalize it to the public. Synthetic biology need to be in sight of the public.
The workshop was divided into eight sections.
Section one consisted an encapsulation of synthetic biology and construction of synthetic biology chassis.
Section two was a discussion about the future and trending of synthetic biology.
Section three was an introduction of the ideal of bio brick in synthetic biology. Energy module, PKS and NRPS were taken as examples.
Section four was about bioinformatics and search for new bio bricks.
Section five was about regulation of genetic circuit in synthetic biology and CRISPRi/a was took as an example.
Section six was about optimizing protein structure and enhancing function of bio bricks.
Section seven was about application of synthetic biology to research for new drugs.The last section was about application of synthetic biology to agriculture and energy industry.
As members of iGEM team of SCUT we hope we could experience(take part in) the workshop in flesh to search for the meaning of synthetic biology and make our contribution to it. So we took part in the preparation and the whole process of the workshop as volunteers. We did learn a lot.
Here is what we got from the workshop:
Our understanding of synthetic biology was based on iGEM ,so in a long time we mistakenly took synthetic biology as a different combination of bio bricks as well as construction and regulation of genetic circuit. During the workshop we learnt that studying synthetic biology also meant construction of synthetic biology chassis, searching for bio bricks, standardization and enhancing of bio bricks .etc. These are parallel parts in synthetic biology and they are not only an assist of “regulation”.
Different from what we believed, synthetic biology is not a branch of biology but a connection between biology and different subjects likes mathematic, bioinformatics, automation, and information technology .etc.
The workshop also gave us a new understanding of the ideal of synthetic biology. There were so many new idea put forward by scientists during the workshop.What impressed us most were OKS and NPRS which the team 2014 SCUT-China and the team 2013 Heidelberg had worked on. We thought these teams had quite new and astonishing idea about OKS and NPRS but their work were only on the stage of designing these two enzymes. In the workshop we found that the idea of OKS and NPRS was quite normal for scientist. In fact it is one of trends of synthetic biology.
What is really new in this area was the idea of separating different domain of the enzyme which could catalyse a reaction independently and rearrange these domains for different functions. Now scientists are looking for new polyketides or polytides with this rearrangement as well as searching for other enzyme which can be separated and rearranged. This was just the synthetic biology in our mind. Another thing that impressed us so much was the idea of energy module. The separation and rearrangement of OKS and NPRS was a design of reality bio bricks and the idea of energy module was a design of abstract bio bricks. A self-contained organism needs energy supplying department, energy consuming department and energy conveying department. for example, a plant has photosynthetic pathway, Respiratory pathway and ATP. ATP has a stable amount in organisms. When a bio-macromolecule is being synthesised, it needs continuous energy supply so we need a new energy unit as the specific energy supply for the organism to synthesise special bio-macromolecules.
The new unit is NXP which is similar with ATP and what we need to do is to develop a suitable energy supplying unit and energy consuming unit.
CRISPR-Cas9 was another example used in the workshop. CRISPR-Cas9 is a universal enzyme for gene editing. We can control the gene segment that Cas9 target to by designing sgRNA which would not influence the structure of Cas9. This is what we talk about module assembly and module standardization.
There is still a question confusing us that is “what is synthetic biology”. Professor Ouyang Xin academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences said synthetic biology is to create or change organisms with rational design for the good of human beings when he accept the interview from Huan Qiu Ke Xue which is the Chinese version of Scientific American. There are three main paths for synthetic biology which are gene synthesis, remaking metabolism system and remaking organisms. Synthesis of mycoplasma promoted by American scientist J.Graig Venter is an example of the first path while synthesis of artemisinin precursors promoted by ay D. Keasling is an example for the second. Nowadays synthetic biologists are often busy in finding new bio bricks optimizing bio bricks and remaking metabolism systems as if these were just the three paths of synthetic biology. But what is the difference between finding bio bricks and finding new genes with traditional bioinformatics technology?what is the difference between optimizing bio bricks and remaking proteins with traditional molecular biology technology and what is the difference between remaking metabolism system in synthetic biology and changing metabolism pathway with metabolic engineering? Or each path of synthetic biology requires all these technologies and ideas. It is also questionable if synthetic biologists are working in different aspects according to their interests or it is scientists working in different field claim to work in synthetic biology because of the popularity of the concept of synthetic biology. For conclusion, synthetic biology is still immature until scientists can work hard in their direction as well as holding the ideas of synthetic biology.
Synthetic biology also needs scientists who can stand up and lead the way of the research in this area and unified data base for bio bricks to store research productions and standard bio bricks. IGEM foundation has set a good example for it in leading research directions and running bio brick data base.
