Our Motivation

Electronic engineering has given us the television and the mobile phone, while genetic engineering has afforded us mass-scale antimalarial drugs, biofuels and an enormous range of biosensors.

More than a decade ago, Tom Knight and colleagues envisioned using 'BioBricks' to standardise synthetic biological parts. Here at Newcastle we want to return to iGEM's humble origins and come full circle. We are currently working on replacing traditional electronic components with biological alternatives. Building a series of new compatible bacterial components, we can mix and match to create electro-biological components within a breadboard.

The circuit will allow synthetic biologists to combine bacterial and electronic components to create electro-biological circuits, offering an exciting new fusion of synthetic biology and computer science. The ultimate goal is to attain consistent outputs for given inputs.

Our Achievements

As a team we’ve achieved a lot over the course of our relatively short (but great!) summer in iGEM. We have designed new parts and documented them and their components in the iGEM registry. Not content with just working on our our project we’ve made lots of new friends through collaboration with a number of teams and our attendance meetups in the UK and in Europe.

As well as getting to know people our own age, we’ve run school taster days to get 16 & 17 year olds interested in synthetic biology and talked to researchers in the field to explore the ethical impact of our work. Beyond the talk we’ve written software to explore different aspects of our work, including how it would integrate into an electric circuit and to use as a thought experiment in exploring the ethics of our work. If you thought we’d just stick to Software you’d be wrong, for our project we built a 'plug 'n' play' breadboard kit to show how we imagine our components being used in the real world.

And that’s not all, over the summer we have also submitted corrections to sequences in the registry and built on the work of past iGEM teams like Tokyo-NoKoGen 2011's use of metallothioneins and the Bielfeld 2013 team's use of porins in microbial fuel cells. And finally, we participated in the 2016 InterLab task completing both the plate reader and flow cytometry data collection work.

You can find much more information, on our achievements and how they relate to the iGEM medal requirements on our medal requirements page.

What Next?

The foundation built by Culture Shock opens up, and shows the huge potential for the emerging field of Bio-electronics. Applications such as self-healing circuitry and "living" electronic and cell integrated computers no longer seem as implausible and distant as they once did.

With any new technology it is important to consider the surrounding ethical issues, as well as general Public response. We felt obligated as a team to spend a large amount of time considering potential ethical issues associated with these ideas. Our Thought Experiment was the culmination of this, and considers four of these key concepts, with each having its own level. You can play through the entire thought experiment here or alternatively read up on our entire human practices work here.

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