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

Practical and Hands-on Biology Education

During the academic year, our team offered a semester-long academic course, entitled iGEM 101, which gave students at our university the chance to learn about the theory and practice of synthetic biology. We designed our course to balance lecture-based instruction on essential concepts in synthetic biology, and real experiments that students would conduct to complete their own mini-project, inspired by real projects by iGEM teams.

We also reached out multiple high schools in the Nashville area, with the hope of starting a high school team. We met with the faculty of three schools, where we described what iGEM was, and asked for them to gauge their students' interests in forming their own iGEM team. We found a number of high school students that were interested in iGEM, who we tried to coalesce into a single Nashville-area high school team. Unfortunately, we were not able resolve the logistical challenges of forming the team. Despite this setback, we have established the groundwork for starting a high school team in the upcoming year.

Implications of Mutation in SynBio

We as team felt throughout our project that the synthetic biology community as a whole has not paid sufficient attention to the danger posed by mutations. As we emphasized throughout our research, no engineered genetic system is immune to mutation, and there is a genuine potential for harm as synthetic biology finds increasing real-world applications.

To help raise awareness of these pressing issues, we developed a survey which we distributed to other iGEM teams. In it, we described some examples of how mutations may derail genetically engineered constructs:

Every geneticist knows that all DNA sequences carry the possibility for mutation. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the risks that these mutations pose to practically applying synthetic biology. Our team is looking for collaborators who are willing to answer a simple question: if your BioBricks were implemented in the real world, what would the consequences be if they ever mutated?

Could it turn your therapeutic into a poison? Could it frustrate production at a commercial scale? Could you lose a priceless genotype? Would it do anything at all? We want to challenge the community to think about these hard questions and critically examine the very real dangers posed by DNA mutation.

For those teams that complete a quick survey about what the consequences of mutation might be for their project, we have a special reward in mind: we will give you access to a computational algorithm that our team has developed to lower the mutagenic potential of gene sequences. Using this algorithm, we can give you statistics on how mutation-prone your favorite BioBricks really are.

We received responses from the University of Virginia, University of Paris-Bettencourt, Team Vilnius-Lithuania, and the University of California San Francisco. Our survey thus helped raise awareness about the dangers that mutations pose to synthetic biology. To take one illustrative example, one team who completed our survey started by writing that they were unable to come up with any way that mutation may affect their project, because all of the genes they work with are endogenous to their model system. Needless to say our team quickly got on the case, and began devising all sorts of devious ways mutations could occur, and started a dialogue about mutational stability.

Industry Outreach

To get a better idea of the consequence of mutations in industrial scale operations, we contacted representatives from companies that work with microbes. We first contacted Dr. Burns from Tennessee Brew Works. She informed us about the significant role that mutations play in quality control for brewing operations. Companies like Tennessee Brew Works will periodically replace the yeast starter cultures they used with frozen stocks. The reason for this is that the yeast can be altered in significant and unpredictable ways over time by processes like mutations. If these companies could make improve the longevity of their yeast cultures by making them more mutation resistant, this could reduce costs, improve the consistency and quality of production bases, and could product priceless brewing strains from mutating.