Difference between revisions of "Team:UChile-OpenBio/Practices"

In Chile, little is known about Synthetic Biology. There is only one Chilean start’up really related to this area, and universities only began to participate in iGEM in 2012.

Synthetic Biology is not taught in educational institutions, particularly in high schools, and few people know what it is even in the Engineering Faculty of the University of Chile, the most prestigious public University of the country. So how can we talk about the applications of Synthetic Biology if nobody knows what it is? How can we raise awareness with our project if people got stuck in their minds that genetically modified organisms are dangerous? How can we make people know about Synthetic Biology and trust in its technology?
To answer these questions, we developed a diffusion plan of this methodology based on three activities:
A pedagogical workshop in high schools, diffusion and participation in the design of a Synthetic Biology course in the Engineering Faculty of the University of Chile and the development of a Synthetic Biology Platform in which participate members of several universities.

Synthetic Biology is still little known in Chile but its numerous applications and its rapid development at international scale make it relevant to teach in educational institutions. Moreover, pupils are the future professionals of the country, so it is necessary to broaden young minds introducing Synthetic Biology, how it works and its collaborative vision. This would help forming responsible citizens.

The Goal

This goal, aligned with the main principles of OpenBio-UChile, drove the team to realize activities centred on Synthetic Biology in high schools, contributing at the same time to the knowledge spreading about Synthetic Biology and to strengthening the group cohesion by empowering its members.
The pedagogic activity consisted in an introduction to Synthetic Biology, a short debate about the use of genetically modified microorganisms and a workshop based on legos to applicate the concepts and principles of Synthetic Biology described during the introduction. The whole activity lasted 1h30 and all the pupils aged from 15 to 18 could participate.

The introduction consisted in presenting what Synthetic Biology is, how it works, what the main engineering principles are and why the collaborative and open work is so important. To make sure all these concepts had been understood, the team organized a game in which the pupils had to find the word corresponding to the projected picture...and some sweets were given to the winners!

Activity in the Mariano de Schoenstatt high school. On the left: our team leader making guess to the pupils the key concepts explained in the previous presentation. On the right: pupils playing the game to win sweets!

The practical activity was based on analogies between the genetic parts of biological systems and the different standardized parts of the game, as it is shown in the picture below.

Representation a genetic module (top) assembling standard pieces of legos (bottom).

The goal was to make the pupils collaboratively find solutions to the exposed problems, which difficulty grade increased as the workshop progressed. The workshop can be downloaded here. The team also elaborated an electronic glossary to make sure that the concepts wouldn’t be forgotten after the activity.

Girls from the high school solving the challenges of the workshop.

As it was the first time that such an activity was implemented, the team asked for students and teachers feedback, in order to improve the pedagogical material for the next collaboration with an educational institution.

We want to thank the two high schools we worked with, for the coordination of the activity and the opportunity they gave us to make the pupils discover this new method: Synthetic Biology. We particularly thank the diffusion of the activity on the website of the high schools. Here you can see the article written on the websites of Colegio Mariano de Schoenstatt, and Colegio La Maisonnette.

Last year, for the first time, was implemented an optional course of Synthetic Biology in the Engineering Faculty, that everyone from the different Departments could take. As it was planned to open the course this year too, two members of the iGEM team decided to be part of the teaching staff, to re-design and improve the first version of the course, taking advantage of the experience gained with iGEM and including the open source philosophy.

As it was said in the introduction, the main difficulty consisted in making people know the existence of Synthetic Biology, which meant for the team making a large diffusion campaign that could reach the whole Faculty.

To do that, we used all the social networks we had and the institution diffusion channels, designing a poster and several short posts that showed the connection that synthetic biology has with Engineering. Moreover, the team organized an activity

Considering the different projects of OpenBio-UChile, it appeared they would have more impact if they came from an organization bigger than a Faculty Organized Group. That’s why we joined an initiative launched by a professor from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, aiming to gather people from different Chilean Universities and related to Synthetic Biology into a global organization which could be a Foundation or NGO.

At the date, the organization is composed of members from three universities, the majority coming from the University of Chile since many students are part of OpenBio-UChile. This initiative was born in March, 2015 and the members met every month to define what would be the objective of the organization, its activities and the ways we could diffuse them.

During these months, we defined the mission, the vision and the business model of the organization, which are described as follows:

Generate, organize and distribute knowledge about Synthetic biology through public events related to science and technology and a web page in which:

all the activities are published and documented

all the protocols and methodologies are open access

all the information about SB events is uploaded

there is a friendly design which allows to easily contact the members of the organization

there is a section where customers can leave comments, visible for all the community.

Channels

OpenBioChile will communicate about its activities through several channels:

• the organization’s web page
• social networks: mail, facebook, twitter, etc.
• scientific events
• interventions in educational institution

Key resources

Since the organization wants to promote the development of such a new field in Chile like Synthetic Biology, its members have to obtain several key resources:

• Human resources:
  
  • One or several experts in Scientific and/or Engineering disciplines
  • Professionals of the educative field
  • Lawyers for legal issues
  • Economy experts to lead with business issues
  • Graphic Designer to develop a friendly and professional web page
  • To satisfy this necessity the organization chose members whose abilities correspond to these profiles: students and teachers from three different universities, all with knowledge about Synthetic Biology, and relatives whose professional career is connected to legal and business issues.
• Funding:
  As the organization does not possess a productive line, it does not have access to a constant flow of income, which makes it very dependant on public funds or particular donations, so funding becomes a key issue
• Internet Domain:
  Since the main value and channel communication of the organization is its web page, it is absolutely necessary to count with an internet domain which supports a highly developed and professional web page.

The most relevant costs associated to the organization’s activities are:

• The communication campaign (web page, advertising cartels for forums, scientific/technological events, etc)
• Wages

Connexion with the environment

In order to identify PLA users and people interested in this new methodology, we talked with several institutions and representatives. Since the idea of our project had born talking with the Fab Lab of the University of Chile, as mentioned in the project time line (hyperlink), we presented our project to the director of the Fab Lab, who wrote us a letter of inquiry (download here ****FALTA).

We also went to talk with Andres Briceño, co-founder of the Santiago Fab Lab, to make our project cross the frontier of the University and see if there was a real need or interest for biological PLA.

There, we discovered other ways to use PLA, since in this Fab Lab they combine PLA with other biodegradable materials such as wood to make composite materials and help the technology to reach the market. Indeed, if PLA is quite used to build prototypes, product designers don’t like working with it because plastic products are not as attractive as wood products, for instance. So the idea of mixing PLA with a more “esthetical” material such as wood allows a friendly design for many objects, which makes composite PLA a good candidate for new 3D-printed products. Moreover, composite PLA can have better mechanical properties than PLA according to the material it is mixed with, and can last more than 2 years without losing its biodegradable properties, which allows a wider range of uses.