Team:Cambridge-JIC/Integrated Practices
INTEGRATED PRACTICES
In order to integrate best practices for open hardware design within our protocols, we spoke to Tobias Wenzel, co-founder of DocuBricks; a website for high quality open source documentation, funded by the OpenPlant program. See what we discussed in the interview:
How we integrated this into our design:
- Bring together biologists, engineers, technologists and others in the Cambridge area for meeting, co-working and socialising in a creative, cross-disciplinary, community-driven and safe environment.
- Provide a well-equipped space for practical biology and engineering of biology on a community membership basis.
- Support new and existing interdisciplinary collaborations for engineering biology, with a focus on promoting open technology and innovation.
- Raise awareness, understanding and participation in biology and engineering of biology in the Cambridge area through public engagement activities, education and training.
- Foster links with local industry and innovation organisations, building bridges between academia and bioenterprise.
OpenPlant
Understanding the bottlenecks of plant synthetic biology and best practices for open science
Hosted at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, the OpenPlant Forum presented talks from some of the most exciting innovations and research developing in plant synthetic biology at this moment. The three-day event also featured panel discussions on predominant issues in this field, including a discussion on “Commercial opportunities and bottlenecks in the future of plant synthetic biology”, featuring the inventor of BioBricks and ‘godfather’ of synthetic biology, Tom Knight.
This discussion raised the need for creating more efficient techniques for engineering plants into chassis for commercial production of biofuels and pharmaceuticals. This is something which we already aim to achieve as part of our project, through a standardised cas9 system for chloroplast engineering, which follows the phytobrick common syntax. Other relevant challenges were also raised in the discussion on “Reprogramming Agriculture”, such as responsible research and public perception of plant synthetic biology. Members of our team took part in this talk, sharing our views with an audience of over 100 people and making the key point that scientists have a responsibility to document their research and methods thoroughly. Mistrust and misunderstanding of what plant synthetic biology will be used for, and the ownership of this technology, is a result of miscommunication between the scientific and nonscientific communities.
The discussions highlighted the importance of DIY Bio Hackspaces, such as those we had encountered at the Bio NightScience event in Paris. By allowing ‘ordinary’ citizens to actively participate in synthetic biology projects for themselves, this helps to bridge the gap between the two communities and create a dialogue between them. This further encouraged our design of a low cost growth facility and gene gun for such spaces, as any techniques for plant engineering which industry hopes to commercialise must first be widely accepted in the public eye. Providing accessibility to these techniques for hackspaces, schools and other small community labs will, we hope, promote more widespread understanding and acceptance of them.
Furthermore, hearing Tobias Wenzel, founder of Docubricks, speak at the OpenPlant Forum gave us the idea to use this format as a template for the documentation of our open source designs. We hope that integrating the same best practices for open documentation used by this site into our own project will help to further support our efforts in removing the bottlenecks to chloroplast engineering, by changing public reaction and accessibility to the technology.
Synthetic Biology Society
Synthetic biology society is a group of students at the University of Cambridge aiming to bring together biologists, engineers, physicists, computer scientists and others to work in synthetic biology and share knowledge. It has been established by previous iGEM members in 2015. The society has ambitions to raise awareness about synthetic biology amongst students, broaden their knowledge through talks and as probably the only Cambridge science society it is actively working on primary research projects.
A few of our members got involved over the year with society’s activities and helped a bit with its beginnings and Lucie is on the current committee as the project manager. Last year’s project still in progress involves building a computer-navigated microscope moving in all three dimensions and scanning samples. Apart from continuing this we are planning a wetlab project in Biomakespace (have a link) which wants to explore cell-free systems. The project may change slightly but we want to make and tune a simple light oscillator (probably using fluorescent proteins fused to luciferase for sharper output changes) and also build a physical electric circuit imitating the biological system. From there we can study and demonstrate if the two systems behave and can be regulated similarly or differently, which may have a big educational value, we could also concentrate on transferring the system into a living organism or even some design using multiple oscillators. The emphasis in the project will be put on sharing skills, learning (even through seminars and trainings) and exploring what synthetic biology and scientific work in a team are all about!
