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 a plethora of biosensors.

More than a decade ago, Tom Knight and colleagues at MIT envisioned using 'BioBricks' to standardise the composition of synthetic biological systems from parts, just as electronic systems are constructed from electronic components. Here at Newcastle, we want to return to iGEM's humble origins and come full circle. We wondered whether we could replace traditional electronic components with biological alternatives. Through the creation of new compatible bacterial components, we aim to unite biological and electrical components to create electro-biological circuitry within a breadboard chassis.

The aim of the Culture Shock project is allow synthetic biologists to combine bacterial and electronic components to create electro-biological circuits, offering an exciting new fusion of synthetic biology, electronic engineering, and computer science.

Our Achievements

As a team, we have achieved a lot over the course of our relatively short (but great!) summer as part of iGEM. We have designed, characterised, and documented new parts in the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Not content with just working on our our project, we have also made lots of new friends through collaboration with a number of teams and our attendance in UK and European meets.

We set out to create biological versions of the electronic components that are used in many electronic circuits, such as lightbulbs, batteries, variable resistors and capacitors. We have  designed , characterised, and documented the genetic designs for these new parts in the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts. We also built a prototype electronic breadboard kit that will allow a user to combine electronic parts with these new biological versions, in a plug-in-and-play format experimental framework. We used the breadboard kit to articulate how we imagine biological and electronic components uniting in the real world.

Not content with just working on our project, we have also made lots of new friends through collaboration with a number of teams and our attendance in UK and European meets. With any new technology it is important to consider the surrounding ethical issues, as well as general Public response. In a novel human practise exercise we sought to apply the concept of a thought experiment to synthetic biology. 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 read up on our entire human practices work here.

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 2013 Bielefeld's use of porins in microbial fuel cells. Last but not least, we participated in the 2016 InterLab study, completing both the plate reader and flow cytometry data collection tasks.

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 advance provided by the Culture Shock project opens up a myriad of potential research routes for the emerging field of Bioelectronics. We hope that applications such as self-healing circuitry and "living" electronic and cell integrated computers no longer seem as implausible and distant as they once did.

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