Team:GeorgiaTech/Practices

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Human Practices

Atlanta Science Festival

The Atlanta Science Festival is an annual event each spring, featuring a week of hands-on activities, facility tours, presentations, and performances throughout the metro Atlanta region. It culminates with the Exploration Expo held at Centennial Olympic Park, located only a ten-minute walk from Georgia Tech’s campus. The free expo attracted upwards of 15,000 visitors and featured over 100 booths with hands on activities, science demos, and presentations, designed to expose STEM topics to patrons of all ages and inspire them to appreciate the sciences.

On March 28th, our iGEM team collaborated with Georgia State’s iGEM team to run a booth on synthetic biology. We taught children about BioBrick assembly through a LEGO brick activity. Each color of a small LEGO brick represented a different BioBrick part, such as a promoter, ribosomal binding site, or a coding sequence. These parts were attached to a larger “backbone” LEGO brick that represented either a bacteria or yeast cell. We thought that brightly colored and tangible LEGO bricks would appeal to children and allow them to visualize the organization of gene sequences. In addition to the LEGO models, we also had displayed samples of E. coli with the gene mCherry fused into them, to demonstrate how we can use recombinant gene sequences to allow E. Coli to take on new properties.

Informational iGEM Pamphlet

In order to spread the word about iGEM to our Georgia Tech campus, we created an informational iGEM pamphlet that talks in layman terms about what iGEM is and how students can get involved. We handed them out to introductory biology, chemistry, and some upper level biology/biomedical engineering classes. Following these hand-out sessions, the iGEM Club, which has been established recently by Georgia Tech’s iGEM team, has seen a huge surge in interest. We hope that these pamphlets will serve as a great stepping-stone for students to not only gain interest in iGEM, but also to foster their curiosity in synthetic biology.

iGEM Lab Techniques Video Series

Following the success of our informational pamphlet, we decided to make a series of educational videos detailing the methods we practiced in lab. The videos include the following topics: PCR, Transformation, Digestion & Ligation, Miniprep, Gel Electrophoresis. These are all laboratory techniques that our project required we familiarize ourselves with. Coming into the summer, our team’s greatest weakness was our lack of experience in the lab, and as a result we spent a lot of time learning basic techniques. Looking back, it would have helped us a lot if there were online resources all in one spot that explained different lab techniques in an easy to understand, succinct manner. We made these videos to help any future iGEM teams or just anyone working in a lab become comfortable with them. They are aimed at someone with basic lab experience but without an extensive background in biological techniques. The iGEM club at Georgia Tech plans on expanding the scope of these videos and covering more techniques in the future so that eventually we will have a large enough database of videos to cover most any technique needed in synthetic biology.

Discussion with Zak Costello

On June 25th, our team met with a Georgia Tech PhD candidate, Zak Costello, who is currently studying electrical and computer engineering (ECE). Zak works in the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Systems Laboratory (GRITS), and is looking to switch to synthetic biology while also utilizing his experience with ECE. In our meeting, he discussed his current research in theoretical controls, which has applications including self-driving cars and auto-correcting spacecrafts, but also expressed his enthusiasm for the field of synthetic biology. We shared our knowledge of biotechnology to help him prepare for his postgraduate work. At the end of our meeting, we discussed the exciting future in store for synthetic biology, including completely synthetic bacteria and yeast chromosomes.

Zak entered Georgia Tech as a biomedical engineering (BME) student but realized he did not enjoy his BME classes. Instead, he found greater interested working in an applied mathematics lab and “fell down the rabbit hole,” (Costello, 2015) leading him further away from synthetic biology. Zak would like to combine his expertise in theoretical controls with his enthusiasm for synthetic systems.

Many years and sleepless nights later, he aspires to return to his original interest in biology. After a Google search on synthetic biology, he found the Georgia Tech iGEM Team and set up a meeting with us to find out more about the field and the tools of synthetic biology. We recommend reading material, including textbooks in general biology and genetics, as well as iGEM Wiki pages from previous years. We thought that these resources would give him a colorful introduction to the diverse field of synthetic biology. We also provided him with examples to think about, as he was interested specifically in protein editing. We explained phage display to him and how it can be used in directed protein evolution, and walked him through our process of researching, selecting, evolving, and characterizing copper-binding proteins.

Our meeting with Zak was beneficial to everyone; we learned about control theory and how its algorithms can be devised to model large system networks, and he was able to learn about synthetic biology. At the end of our meeting, we talked about exciting advances in synthetic biology, as Zak brought up the completely synthetic yeast genome, published in March 2014, that deeply interests him. All of us agree that synthetic biology will be an important field that will have an impact on our lives in the near future--and the scope of synthetic biology extends far beyond those in the biology field.