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        <h1>Human Practices <br> <small>How our projects fit into the world</small></h1>
 
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         <h1>Human Practices <small> <br>How our projects fit into the world<small></h1>    
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         <h2 class="featurette-heading">California Academy of Sciences <span class="small">Interacting with the public</span></h2>
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        <p class="lead">We participated in poster sessions and gave presentations throughout the summer to showcase our work and learn from our peers. Our audiences included the the students at the NASA Ames Advanced Studies Laboratories, the participants of the Sierra Systems and Synbio Symposium, and the recipients of the Stanford Bioengineering Research Experience for Undergraduate grants. </p>
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      <h2 class="featurette-heading">Interviews with Experts, Engaging with Peers, and Public Outreach<span class="small"> <br></span></h2>
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      <p class="lead">Our team participated in various activities throughout the summer that fall under the spectrum of "Human Practices." At the Bay Area Maker Faire and the California Academy of Sciences, we discussed synthetic biology, iGEM, and our project with members of the public. We gave and attended presentations on research projects done by our peers at Stanford, NASA, and other Northern California schools. And, to better understand potential uses of and needs for biOrigami in space, we interviewed six experts from NASA and Brown University. </p>
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      <h2 class="featurette-heading">Our BioBricks</h2>
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      <p class="lead">The BioBricks that we submitted to the registry are related to plastic production, cellulose binding, sporulation markers, and pigment production. Click to see more.</p>
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        <h2 class="featurette-heading">2015 Bay Area Maker Faire <span class="small">Synthetic biology as part of the Maker Movement</span></h2>
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        <p class="lead">In May 2015, our team held a booth at the 2015 Bay Area Maker Faire. We discussed our team's project ideas, previous Stanford-Brown teams' projects, and synthetic biology as it fits into the Maker movement more broadly. We also led interactive activities such as origami folding and DNA extractions, and had posters with questions such as "If you could make anything with biology, what would you make?" with opportunities to write and draw answers. This was a great opportunity for us to get feedback from the public on our project ideas.</p>
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      <p class="lead">BOur team went to the California Academy of Sciences, a museum in San Francisco, California and gave a presentation on our projects to several senior staff members. This also gave us the opportunity to get the perspective of Dr. Meg Lowman ("Canopy Meg"), a rainforest canopy researcher, on uses for biological, self-folding objects in her line of work. We were invited back to hold a demonstration of biOrigami in the museum, during which museum goers were invited to experiment with folding sheets of thermoplastic using an infrared lamp. We provided Shrinky Dink sheets and different colors of markers, explained the molecular mechanisms behind folding using heat, and asked participants to predict what shapes would be created from their designs. Members of our team were also interviewed and filmed by media specialists at the Cal Academy for a video on synthetic biology and our iGEM team that will be released soon.</p>
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          <h2 class="featurette-heading">Poster sessions and presentations <span class="small">Interacting with other researchers</span></h2>
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          <p class="lead">We undertook several poster sessions and gave presentations during the summer to showcase our work at various events, including the California Academy of Sciences, NASA Ames ASL poster sessions, Stanford REU program presentation sessions.  </p>
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          <h2 class="featurette-heading">Interviews with Experts<span class="small"> Input and ideas from experts in space missions</span></h2>
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      <h2 class="featurette-heading">Polystyrene <span class="small"> <br>Engineering <i>E. coli</i> to produce thermoplastics</span></h2>
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          <p class="lead">When conceptualizing and developing our project, we wanted to make sure that it could fulfill an actual need for NASA's missions. We are grateful to have been able to interview several scientists from NASA, the Rhode Island Space Grant, and Brown University. Four of their interviews were video taped, and are available to watch here.</p>
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      <p class="lead">Polystyrene is widely-used thermoplastic that is resistant to photolysis. Our team worked on creating the first BioBricks for producing polystyrene <i>in vivo</i>. We believe that the properties of this plastic make it attractive for manufacturing objects on long-term missions to other planets. </p>
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          <p>Full transcript:</p>
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      <a href="https://2015.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown/PS" class="btn btn-danger btn-lg">Read More!</a>
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          <p>Pete Schultz (PS): It’s fun just to think about what you can do with these types of devices.<br><br>
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            Erica Jawin (EJ): The sort of organic, biosynthetic technology that you’re developing here has incredible applications.<br><br>
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             JH: Going from fly-bys, to orbiters, to landers, to rovers, to human exploration, is completely increasingly complexity, which things like origami concepts could help with in all dimensions.<br>
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            Saving Mass, Volume, and Time<br><br>
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            EJ: We’ve been restricted a lot by space, by mass.<br><br>
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            JH: Up-mass to Mars is a huge problem and you want to have as much available.<br><br>
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             <p><font size="1"><b>Polymerized Styrene</b> </font></p>
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            Lauren Jozwiak (LJ): One of the biggest constraints in any space mission is up-mass. It is the guiding thing from principle design all the way through final mission, and it really controls what you can and cannot take with you on the mission, and instruments have been cut in the past because of up-mass. So if you have the ability to save space, to save mass, in any way, via your origami, you open up a whole new world of possibilities of what you can take. You can take more instruments, you can do more science, and you can utilize your missions in better ways and ultimately save more money because you are being more efficient with your space and that’s really, really a key thing.<br><br>
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            JH: When I worked in astronaut training in Apollo, the problem we had was that there’s a huge amount of time in which the astronauts aren’t looking around at the geology, but are actually just doing tasks, which are important to do, but if you could figure out a way to free them from that by using these unfolding and self-folding origami type technologies, so to speak, then that would be amazing because Dave Scott, the Apollo 15 commander said, “We gotta work on this, we gotta work on this, because if we can free us up, we can just go twice as far, do all these different things, and really understand the geology better.” <br><br>
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            Idea 1: Robots and Rovers<br><br>
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            JH: So, this is a great principle to apply to robotic spacecraft, particularly I think rovers and deploying rovers, on the moon, on Mars, and other planetary bodies as well.<br><br>
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            EJ: The issue with a lot of the rovers, for example, that are deployed on the surface of Mars, like the Mars Exploration rovers, and the Mars Science Laboratory, is they have a lot of moving parts. So for example, the Mars exploration rovers have solar panels, that once it lands, the rover has to deploy, and open, and then tilt towards the sun. <br><br>
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            JH: Sometimes the arms fold out like this to reveal the rover, other times you have to do this like, airbags have to be mechanically retracted, etc.<br> <br>
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            EJ: But the more moving parts you have, the more easily something could break. If you can deploy some sort of self-folding origami, that can just open once and then be stationary, that’s a lot fewer parts that can actually malfunction.<br><br>
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            JH: If you could make them work in such a way that they compress themselves or opened up themselves, it would save a huge amount of up-mass, and down-mass, and also time. <br> <br>
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            EJ: And the rover can have a much longer lifetime potentially.<br><br>
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      <p class="lead">P(3HB) is a biodegradable, non-toxic biopolymer with properties similar to those of common plastics. It has a low glass transition temperature and can be formed into flat sheets for folding biOrigami. We are building on previous iGEM teams' work to optimize the production of P(3HB) for use in space.</p>
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            Idea 2: Structures and Sensors for Precursor Missions<br><br>  
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      <a href="https://2015.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown/PHA" class="btn btn-warning btn-lg">Read More!</a>
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            JH: Origami approaches, both compressing and opening up, would be really applicable to precursor missions where you would send supplies and other things that would be able to be constructed robotically so that you have done a huge amount of the work for the infrastructure before the humans got there.<br><br>
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            EJ: And so you could deploy tons of metal and building materials, and have rovers build a habitat over years, or you could just send a piece of self-folding origami that can, with a little bit of an electric charge, just construct itself, and then have humans just drive up to this habitat and walk in and immediately start doing science. That makes a huge difference by itself. <br> <br>
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            JH: When we explore the planets, one of the things we really want to understand, for Mars, for example, is the weather. If we’re going to send humans there, you need to know microenvironments, not just the general planetary environment. So you want to deploy spacecraft, small spacecraft that have these sensors on them, as many places as you can. And that means you have a huge amount of mass, for a large number of these things so make them simple, and self-operating, like fold them up very tightly so you can send hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and then have them open up and operate by themselves to reveal solar panels or other sensors. This would be great.<br><br>
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            Brainstorming More Ideas: Objects, Medical Devices, Habitats<br> <br>
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            PS: There are a lot of devices you could use that would fold up using these biologically-constructed materials. I’ve thought about a couple of them. One of them is for example, in the space station for shelter, or privacy. Let’s talk about privacy first. I know that you’re in an enclosed area for a long time, but sometimes you’d just like to be alone. So if you could devise something that would simply fold up, unfold, and then fold up to be able to create this privacy space, that would really be a handy thing that I could imagine.<br><br>
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            LJ: There are actually deposits of water ice, hydroxyl, in the shallow subsurface, we’re talking the upper centimeters of the moon, at the poles, in these regions that never see sunlight. You could send up some sort of condenser tent over these permanently shadowed regions, harvest the water, fold around the water, and now you’ve got a cup full of this lunar water for use for the astronauts for whatever they needed, for fuel, for hydration.<br> <br>
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            PS: I can imagine habitats. I can imagine shelters. I can imagine them as partitions. I can imagine them any place where it’s confined, any place where you really want to have simple materials that you want to use the Earth or some other source that you already have there.<br><br>
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            EJ: So if you can create some sort of habitat that could unfold itself like origami and create a habitable environment for humans, that could protect them from these global dust storms that you have. This could protect them and provide some radiation shielding. It could provide a thermal buffer and could create an atmosphere that humans could breathe, unlike the carbon dioxide atmosphere that’s present on the surface of Mars.<br><br>
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            PS: Something that would flex and relax, flex and relax, you could turn it turn it into a focusable lens, just like the eye works by having muscles that pull, changes the focal length, you could do the same thing if you had them rimming a lens that was flexible. And that could be used for adjustment. You could use it to adjust, say, for example, you want to increase the energy that would go into a spot from the sun, and suddenly you have fire. Or, if it’s something just to focus at different times, for a rapid focusing device.<br><br>
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            PS: I can also picture using one of these things in a slightly different way. The type of devices that would expand and contract depending on temperature. I thought, wouldn’t that be cool to put this into a bird? Something that could adjust, very similar to the way the Wright brothers used to do it with their feet and hands, to adjust the aerodynamics of the wings?<br><br>
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            EJ: What sort of implications does your self-folding have for backpackers? And any kind of space-saving technology that we can develop is going to have these sort of spin-off benefits that will pervade their way into every day life, not just exploration or space travel, but you know, backpackers, or for surgeons, or, I don’t know, anything.<br><br>
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    <h2 class="featurette-heading">BioHYDRAS<span class="small"> <br>Creating biological artificial muscles</span></h2>
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            PS: So there’s some devices that actually fold up like that, so it’s really interesting to think that these things could actually fold up in sequence and actually begin to walk across the moon.<br>
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    <p class="lead">Based on work done by Chen <i>et al.</i> at Columbia university, we sought to employ the contractile properties of bacterial spores to use as a folding mechanism for biOrigami. Since spores are resistant to high amounts of radiation and dramatic changes in temperature, they could be suitable for use on space missions. </p>
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            PS: I’m picking up samples, and you know the sample containers take up a lot of space, so it would be really interesting to have something that would be different sizes of samples – things that would be flat but then turned into something that would then occupy space with the sample. That would be something very valuable.<br><br>
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    <a href="https://2015.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown/bioHYDRA" class="btn btn-success btn-lg">Read More!</a>
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            PS: So I think of some other things you could use, they’re flexible devices. You could put them around a leg, for example, or an arm, as a splint, a rapid split, that would simply contract and hold it in place. But you could keep it in a very compact first aid kit.<br><br>
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            PS: This is not rocket science here, these are just random thoughts. But anything else, I mean, this is just… right now it blows my mind. <br>
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    <h2 class="featurette-heading">CRATER <span class="small"> <br>CRISPR/Cas9-Assisted Transformation-Efficient Reaction</span></h2>
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    <p class="lead">Our team has devised a method of increasing the efficiency of bacterial transformations&mdash;a technique used by iGEMers and biologists world-wide.</p>
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    <a href="https://2015.igem.org/Team:Stanford-Brown/CRATER" class="btn btn-info btn-lg">Read More!</a>
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            <h6>Copyright &copy; 2015 Stanford-Brown iGEM Team</h6>
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Revision as of 20:04, 18 September 2015

Projects

Human Practices
How our projects fit into the world

Interviews with Experts, Engaging with Peers, and Public Outreach

Our team participated in various activities throughout the summer that fall under the spectrum of "Human Practices." At the Bay Area Maker Faire and the California Academy of Sciences, we discussed synthetic biology, iGEM, and our project with members of the public. We gave and attended presentations on research projects done by our peers at Stanford, NASA, and other Northern California schools. And, to better understand potential uses of and needs for biOrigami in space, we interviewed six experts from NASA and Brown University.

California Academy of Sciences
Interacting with the public in a science museum

BOur team went to the California Academy of Sciences, a museum in San Francisco, California and gave a presentation on our projects to several senior staff members. This also gave us the opportunity to get the perspective of Dr. Meg Lowman ("Canopy Meg"), a rainforest canopy researcher, on uses for biological, self-folding objects in her line of work. We were invited back to hold a demonstration of biOrigami in the museum, during which museum goers were invited to experiment with folding sheets of thermoplastic using an infrared lamp. We provided Shrinky Dink sheets and different colors of markers, explained the molecular mechanisms behind folding using heat, and asked participants to predict what shapes would be created from their designs. Members of our team were also interviewed and filmed by media specialists at the Cal Academy for a video on synthetic biology and our iGEM team that will be released soon.
















Subproject Overview

Polystyrene
Engineering E. coli to produce thermoplastics

Polystyrene is widely-used thermoplastic that is resistant to photolysis. Our team worked on creating the first BioBricks for producing polystyrene in vivo. We believe that the properties of this plastic make it attractive for manufacturing objects on long-term missions to other planets.

Read More!

Polymerized Styrene

Poly-3-hydroxybuterate, P(3HB)
Optimizing the biological production of additional thermoplastics

P(3HB) is a biodegradable, non-toxic biopolymer with properties similar to those of common plastics. It has a low glass transition temperature and can be formed into flat sheets for folding biOrigami. We are building on previous iGEM teams' work to optimize the production of P(3HB) for use in space.

Read More!
Generic placeholder image

BioHYDRAS
Creating biological artificial muscles

Based on work done by Chen et al. at Columbia university, we sought to employ the contractile properties of bacterial spores to use as a folding mechanism for biOrigami. Since spores are resistant to high amounts of radiation and dramatic changes in temperature, they could be suitable for use on space missions.

Read More!
Generic placeholder image

CRATER
CRISPR/Cas9-Assisted Transformation-Efficient Reaction

Our team has devised a method of increasing the efficiency of bacterial transformations—a technique used by iGEMers and biologists world-wide.

Read More!
CRATER Overview
Copyright © 2015 Stanford-Brown iGEM Team