iGEM Team Tokyo_Tech has had outstanding projects every year especially in terms of experiments and modeling. This year, in order to develop furthermore, we had hold outreach activities positively from the beginning of our project. Also we had dialogues with the public and stakeholders to apply their advice to our project. Moreover, we had built this project, considering the contribution to society. Currently, synthetic biology is unfamiliar to the public, and in most cases, they cannot comprehend it easily. However, using Snow White story that everyone knows, our project is interesting and accessible. We did human practice activities to raise public interest in synthetic biology and to inspire the public to learn it with a familiar story, Snow White. What is more, our research about TA system and QS created "ACA Dwarfs" and "TA system ~Queen's Caprice~." Additionally, we are doing the experiments of E. coli mutants that secrete proteins extracellularly. It makes a giant step toward technological developments in economy in the future.

Through communicating with the public, it was shown that people tend to have an erroneous idea about genetic modification, and E. coli, and they have almost no idea about synthetic biology. Additionally, there is some advice that they cannot understand the contribution to society primarily. In order to solve those problems, we created a model called 3E model to find out the contribution of this project from three aspects: education, ethics, and economy. We are aiming to make our iGEM activity have an utmost contribution to society. Additionally, we summarized how the outreach activities, the lessons we gave and the dialogues with experts had made changes to our project, and what we thought with advice from them and what we did in chronological order. Moreover, Snow White in Grimm's Fairy tales has a lot of versions published so far. Although we were not able to use experiments to represent all the different versions of the story, we were able to design a gene circuit.

We take our project into consideration from three aspects: education, ethics, and economy. From these three aspects, we can approach in various ways, thereby can grasp our project multilaterally. So far, we had worked on many activities to inform the public distinctly of E. coli, genetic modification, and synthetic biology. Once we faced some issues, we had many discussions and also tried solving the problems. Secondly, we had thought about ethics as a key point in our project and made ethics code of iGEM 2016 team Tokyo_Tech. Furthermore, we coordinated activities to achieve the protein production control using TA system. Although it is difficult to use commercially at present, it is a great achievement that we created the idea and technology regarded as a steppingstone. This page shows all of our human practice activities.

Economy

In promoting our project, we had dialogues with the public and experts. Based on the opinions from them, we developed our project. This led to success in creation of a well-rounded project with the connection between the public and experts, keeping from our narrow view.

This page explains the changes that some events had made to our project in chronological order.

After having dialogue with expert, we obtained the comment that TA system has the potential to be linked to the development of effective technology.

However, at present there exit problems when using a TA system to control the protein production. We cannot selectively produce only desired protein, because other proteins also would be produced at the same time.

Then our dry lab used Java to reseach into the development of ACA base sequence's number adjustable software which we call it "ACA Dwarfs" as a solution to the problem.

In this way, we integrated Human Practices to out project. However, we have done much more activities for Human Practices and show them in detail below.

Summary

We "went beyond the lab" and developed our project through human practice activities.

We did not just reflect the opinions on our project from the dialogue with the public and experts. Firstly, we investigated and discussed the issues on our own. Secondly, in the light of the application of our project, we did the experiments and modeling. Finally, we succeeded in the creation of "ACA dwarfs" and "the growth and death wave by toxin-antitoxin on agar medium." What is more, we are doing the experiments to make E. coli mutants that secrete protein extracellularly. They probably lead to the further development of our project.

As above, we have succeeded in integrated Human Practice.

Suzukake Festival (May 14 & 15, 2016)

The Suzukake Festival, the school festival on the Suzukakedai campus, was held on May 14-15, 2016. We introduced iGEM and our projects to the visitors to let them know synthetic biology and got feedbacks.

Homecoming Day (May 21, 2016)

Homecoming Day is an annual event held at Tokyo Tech. We introduced iGEM and synthetic biology to alumni. We realized that it is hard to explain our research themes and goals to the public clearly. Therefore, we decided to make videos about E. coli and genetic modification.

Reference

The remaking of fairy tale "Snow White" by the Brothers Grimm has enjoyed a lot of versions since it was published in 1812 in the first edition of their collection Grimms" Fairy Tales. Some elements are common in any Snow White stories. However, because authors add their original elements or features to the story, it becomes unique. We chose other two versions, "Mirror Mirror" and "A Snow White Christmas" and designed their genetic circuits.