Gold Award

This year MSBT covered a wide range of projects regarding human practices in order to achieve a holistic approach to our project. We considered public engagement, education, integrated practices and safety when thinking of our project, a diagnostic tool that could help save thousands of life across the world. All of these activities came to be interconnected in some form or another which contributed to the strength of our project.

Public Engagement and Education

To begin, we participated in and created public engagement activities in which we sought to establish dialogue with kids, teenagers and parents who had a concern or interest regarding synthetic biology. We accomplished the purpose of promoting synthetic biology through our participation in the Building with Biology event at the Michigan Science Center and the Ann Arbor Health Hacks as well as through the GISE and Biotechnology camps we organized.
We then spanned out to create bigger projects that could be reached and used by more people. To clear any misconceptions and common myths of the field, we designed and curated a Q&A-style site, which also served the purpose of promoting and educating on synthetic biology.
In order to reach out to other IGEM teams, we created a Bench-to-Bedside guide—a model business guideline—in which we describe how to take a diagnostic test from the laboratory to the real world. This guideline can be used and built upon by future IGEM teams to expand their projects and make a difference in the world.
You can read in more detail about each of our activities in our engagement tab.

Integrated Practices

Any project must have solid roots and be viable in order to be able to implement it in real life. To achieve this, our team was sure to meet with health professionals both involved in the field of tuberculosis and/or synthetic biology, which helped shape the direction and concept of our project from its scientific concept in the wet lab all the way to its possible implementation as a market product. Our team consulted with the president of the Relief for Africa foundation, Rama Kannenje, who indicated the prevalent need for point-of-care diagnostics. Additionally, experts like Grace Hsia, the CEO of Warmilu, brought to our attention the widespread poverty in countries where tuberculosis is endemic. During our participation in the Ann Arbor Health Hacks we also met with many health professionals who contributed ideas that improved our project.
You can read in more detail about how we implemented professional’s opinions into our project in our integrated practices tab.

Michigan Science Center

We were invited to participate in the Building with Biology event at the Michigan Science Center in Detroit, Michigan. This event took place on August 6th, 2016 and is part of a larger national initiative across museums in the country through the National Science Foundation, the NISE Network and the Science Museum of Boston. Its purpose is to provide a space of conversation about synthetic biology between scientists and the general public, ranging from kids to adults, in order to eliminate the “pipeline of doom” polarized thought regarding this topic. Examples of the activities done included a simple DNA isolation, a virus making activity and an activity where people considered the uses of synthetic biology regarding food. There was also an activity where people considered in what kind of research they would invest in, among many others. These interactive activities are designed to educate on the technologies used in synthetic biology in a simple way. Afterwards, a few members of our team gave a presentation on iGem, our project, and a successful example of the everyday use of synthetic biology in many peoples' lives: the synthesis of human insulin. We were happy to participate in such an edifying event and were able to answer many people’s questions and concerns while having fun.

Ann Arbor Health Hacks

We competed and won the health hackathon competition organized by Ann Arbor Health Hacks held from June 14-16, 2016. Hackathons like these bring people with diverse backgrounds together to solve problems that they propose. We took our basic Aptapaper idea and through talking with the other hackathon participants worked to envision a version that could help diagnose heart disease.The hackathon was actually where we came up with the idea to use proximity dependent ligation instead of a toehold switch for our design. As part of the hackathon, we interacted with the other 200 or so participants from all different health related fields, teaching them about synthetic biology as they taught us about aspects of their particular field that were relevant to our project.

Girls in Science and Engineering (GISE)

In mid-June, the team helped out with the University of Michigan's GISE summer camp. We held two sessions where we showed middle-school girls how to extract DNA from strawberries and their own spit--an integral technique in synthetic biology! Aside from the activities, we explained the basics of genetics and synthetic biology. Despite the numerous spills and messes, the girls were intrigued with how the spidery liquid (full of their own DNA) contained in the microcentrifuge tube held all the instructions for their bodies! Hopefully, they'll be the next generation of Michigan Synthetic Biologists!

Biotechnology Camp

We partnered with miRcore, a non profit organization advocate for high school students education in bioscience in the midwest to organize a biotechnology camp that we held from August 1st - 5th, 2016. Students were freshman, sophomores and juniors interested in learning more about biotechnology. We trained them on proper use of the lab and safety. Each student worked on cloning a GFP fragment into a high copy plasmid (pGLO). During the first day students isolated the bacterial DNA that had GFP with a miniprep, amplified the plasmid with PCR and verified it was the correct size running it on an agarose analytical gel. During the second day they purified their PCR product using a kit, then digested and ligated with a linearized pGLO vector. On the third day of the camp students transformed their ligations into DH5a competent cells. These techniques sparked student’s interest in synthetic biology, since none of them does this type of work in their biology lab classes.