Difference between revisions of "Team:Vanderbilt/Practices/Collaborations"

Revision as of 01:49, 19 September 2015

Vanderbilt iGEM 2015

Our team had many productive collaborations with universities across the world. We were especially excited by the number of teams who approached us out of interest in the numerous mutation-reducing tools that our team has developed. We were happy to give these teams free access to our optimization techniques, which not only helped our collaborators to improve the stability of their genetic elements, but also helped us expand our techniques to new applications and even new organisms.

University of Paris-Bettencourt: The team at Paris-Bettencourt approached us out of concern for the stability of their genetically engineered fermenting microbes. Given the importance of strict quality control and long-term stability in the applications that their team was envisioning for their project, they had a keen interest in making their genes more stable. We offered to optimized their fermentation genes using our computational algorithm. As their team did not have sufficient time to synthesize the genes we sent them, we also provided them with statistics on how many mutation-prone sites their original genes had and how much they can be improved for stability.

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Team

About
Members
Attributes
Sponsors

Project

Background
Sequence
Circuit
Organism
Nanopore
Achievements

Parts

Part Collection
Optimized RFPs
Visualizing Evolution
Repair Enzymes

Notebook

May
June
July
August
September

Practices

Safety
Collaborations
Applications
Interlab

Software

Development
User Guide
Statistics

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-Ethics of Synthetic Biology: An Expert Perspective
+Our team had many productive collaborations with universities across the world. We were especially excited by the number of teams who approached us out of interest in the numerous mutation-reducing tools that our team has developed. We were happy to give these teams free access to our optimization techniques, which not only helped our collaborators to improve the stability of their genetic elements, but also helped us expand our techniques to new applications and even new organisms.
-	As our team was developing our project ideas at the beginning of the year, we had the tremendous fortune to meet with Dr. James Collins from Arizona State University, who was giving a special seminar at our university. Dr. Collins is the former Director of the Population Biology and Physiological Ecology program at the National Science Foundation and the current Ullman Professor of Natural History and the Environment at Arizona State University, where he studies evolution and extinction in natural ecosystems. Recently, Dr. Collins has become involved in questions of synthetic biology and how it relates to responsible ethological and ethical practice. He was a lead author on the recent report Creating a Research Agenda for the Ecological Implications of Synthetic Biology, where he has raised some important yet under-emphasized questions in the potential effects that genetic technologies could have on the stability of natural ecosystems. Dr. Collins has been trying to start a dialogue in the synthetic biology community about new advances like "gene drives", which may have the potential to drive entire species into extinction. While these technologies may have enormous potential in preventing malaria, as Dr. Collins noted in his seminar, there are some significant ethical questions that need to be carefully considered.
-	Our iGEM team co-sponsored a question-and-answer session following Dr. Collins' seminar, where we invited students to ask Dr. Collins about his thoughts on some of the broader questions of conducting responsible research. There were many questions from the audience, and Dr. Collins did an excellent job at conveying some of the ethical difficulties of navigating these genetic technologies. To start a genuine conversation, Dr. Collins also asked many of his questions to the audience, made up off a diverse group of students from multiple academic backgrounds. Some of the topics included were:
+University of Paris-Bettencourt: The team at Paris-Bettencourt approached us out of concern for the stability of their genetically engineered fermenting microbes. Given the importance of strict quality control and long-term stability in the applications that their team was envisioning for their project, they had a keen interest in making their genes more stable. We offered to optimized their fermentation genes using our computational algorithm. As their team did not have sufficient time to synthesize the genes we sent them, we also provided them with statistics on how many mutation-prone sites their original genes had and how much they can be improved for stability.
--the ethics of modifying the genomes of human embryos with CRISPR/Cas9
--Ecological risk of genetically modified crops
--Safety of "gene drives" and the possibility of unintended consequences
--Risk that mutations pose to safely implementing genetic engineering
-As Dr. Collins noted at the end of our event, "these questions are not easy to answer. Many of them may not even have simple answers. That is why I am trying to start us thinking about these issues, and where these new [genetic] technologies may be leading us".
-	 After our event with Dr. Collins, our team joined Dr. Collins for dinner, where we continued the conversation on bioethics and asked for his thoughts on our project to reduce mutation. Dr. Collins was enthusiastic about the potential of the benefits that our breakthrough could bring the field. One application Dr. Collins immediately honed in on was use in conjunction with engineered genes released into environment. There, Collins noted, there is very high danger that existing containment strategies like killswitches could fail if even a single organism has its killswitch mutated.
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