In Chile, little is known about Synthetic Biology. There is only one Chilean start’up (web page) really related to this area, and universities only began to participate in iGEM in 2012 Team UC_Chile.
To answer these questions, we developed a diffusion plan of this
methodology based on three activities:
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.
As this kind of activity was new for the high schools the team worked with, teachers helped with internal diffusion and they also invited other teachers and authorities of the institution.
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 pictures and some sweets were given to the winners!
Right after this game the pupils were asked what they thought about the genetic modification of living beings...and the conversation reached the topic of Super Heroes and improved human beings!
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.
Pupils had to assemble promotors, RBS, coding sequences and terminators, represented by pieces of different colours and lengths, and make the modules interact between them with pieces of wool. This way, they could represent events like activation or inhibition of a promotor and production of a protein. Activation, inhibition and production were symbolized by green, red and white threads, respectively.
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 glossaryto make sure that the concepts wouldn’t be forgotten after the activity.
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.
If you are interested in knowing more about how the activity was received, here you can read some comments and see a video recorded at the end of the last activity. If you want to see more photos, please visit our gallery.
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 Mariano de Schoenstatt high school, and La Maisonnette high school.
We also particularly want to thank the Chilean National Commission of Cooperation with UNESCO, which provided us its support to realize this activity through a letter (download here)
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 again the course this year, 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.
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 opened to the entire Faculty, in which the teacher could talk about the course and answer the questions pupils made. The team made an introduction to Synthetic Biology with an activity very similar to the workshop realized in high schools. Even so, very few people registered the course. Twelve people came to the activity realized in the Faculty and 5 registered the course. However we felt we were giving birth to something that could impact the Faculty, so the motivation to design the course is still intact.
Considering the different projects of OpenBio-UChile, it appeared they would have more impact if they came from a wider organization than a Faculty Organized Group. That’s why we joined an initiative launched by a professor from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Fernán Federici, aiming to gather people from different Chilean Universities and related to Synthetic Biology into a global organization which could be a Foundation or a 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 we met every month to define what would be the objective of the organization, its activities and the ways we could diffuse them.
We are a non-lucrative, collaborative and open source organization, pioneer in promoting Synthetic Biology development in Chile to establish a continuous diffusion and education and generate tools about this technic. Centralizing information about Synthetic Biology and diffusing it through a Web platform will enable us to reach a large spectrum of Chilean society.
To promote the collaboration and Open Access to knowledge about Synthetic Biology in Chile.
This will be the first organization of that type in Chile which could centralize information about Synthetic Biology and constantly diffuse it through a Web platform in an open data way. Also, the organization is composed of members from different universities and disciplines, where each one has diverse skills which can complement each other, allowing a faster share of information and technological development through collaboration. Also, we think creating a perdurable organization would have a bigger impact, in the long term, compared to different activities performed by iGEM Teams year to year.
Since the idea of our project had born talking with the Fab Lab of the University of Chile, as mentioned in the attritubution section (conception of the idea), we presented our project to the director of the Fab Lab, who wrote us a letter of inquiry.
We also talked 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 use.
When we presented our project, Andres Briceño agreeded that although prices can vary a lot according to the country of origin, it is expensive to buy PLA. He added that if we could demonstrate our fabrication process is cheaper than the current ones, the project would turn very attractive for many digital fabrication laboratories, for he gave us his support at the end of the visit, sending us another letter of inquiry.
We reached the Government through the Ministry of the Environment, which manifested its interest through a letter of inquiry, in which it recognizes the importance of “the fabrication of biodegradable materials which implies fewer possible impacts on the environment".
In order to evaluate those impacts, the positive and negatives ones, we met with Claudia Mac Lean, in charge of the Sustainability Office of the Faculty. She made us present our project to her pupils in the context of a Sustainable Project Workshop and she gave us some pieces of advice, like developping a Life Cycle Assessment analysis or asking us the functionality of our plastic; will it be used for every kind of plastic objects? What consequences could have such a production? This was useful to wonder, for example:
After analysing and debating this problem, our main discussions and conclusions were:
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analysis would bring us a lot of quantitative information about our project, because it would make us know the specific impacts of the production process in term of equivalent CO2 (carbon dioxide) generation[1] . Nevertheless, we discovered LCA in a late phase of the project, so we didn’t have enough time to do this quantitative analysis because we should have looked for all the inputs and outputs of equivalent CO2 of feedstock and energy, for each stage of our process, which is a complex task.
We infer PLA can be degraded into lactate, which could enter into the metabolic cycle of anaerobic bacteria, generating CH4 (methane) and/or CO2[2] . Environments without oxygen could be found in typical landfills, so in a hypothetical situation where PLA would be established in our society (it means PLA would have totally replaced plastic from fossil origin), huge amounts of PLA could worsen the global warming (due to greenhouse gases emissions)[3] . Nevertheless, a controlled degradation of PLA would allow to take advantage of CH4 generation by producing energy from its combustion and would help to reduce the effects of climate change[4]. If we implemented our project in the long term we would promote cultivation of macroalgae which could contribute to economic development of Chile. Also, macroalgae don’t require any farmland, fertilizer or fresh water and is a renewable resource, so it is a better alternative than corn cultivation (which is one of the main current production modes). Nevertheless, the Chilean regulation of macroalgae uses should be constantly checked to avoid overexploitation and imbalance of natural ecosystem where macroalgae live.
We think one advantage of using macroalgae is that it could close the carbon cycle; it means macroalgae would consume environmental CO2 generated in the PLA production process, allowing global reduction of CO2. In the case of fossil plastic this wouldn’t occur because current plastics are made of fossil combustible, which positively contributes to increase global CO2 amounts if they are partially degraded or combusted .
On the other hand, the big problem of fossil plastic is its accumulation[5] . For example, if we suppose a constant production of the same amount of PLA and PET (a fossil plastic), after 5 years, higher amounts of PET would b expected to be found because a percentage of PLA should be degraded in the first two years[6] . But if PLA had a short degradation time, we guess people would replace it more frequently by buying more PA products, so higher amounts of PLA could be thrown away and the accumulation rate would increase. We think the trade off between replacing fossil plastics and avoiding an overproduction of PLA should need further analysis to evaluate the real impact of the PLA production process. According to the previous reflection, we recommend to use PLA for products which will have a short life-time (<2 years), for example plastic cups or bags. On the contrary, for long life-time products such as pipes, chairs or big structures, it would be appropriate to keep using fossil plastics. On the particular case of medical use, we think PLA should be used like suture, because sutures need to be degraded in a short time [ref suture]. Moreover, the degradation would have no nefast consequences on the organism as PLA is a biocompatible material.
Referencias
[1]CRA Europe. 12 Benefits of Life Cycle Assessment. [online]