Team:Bilkent-UNAMBG/Public Engagement
STORY BOOK
Our team members Merve Nida Baştürk and İlayda Şenyüz wrote a story book for children, titled as “THE ADVENTURES OF UMAY IN SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY”. This book aims to introduce synthetic biology to the children in an intriguing way. The main character of the book Umay is a little girl whose grandfather has diabetes mellitus. Throughout the story, Umay tries to find an alternative, easy-to-use therapeutics for his grandfather via synthetic biology as we did. Integrating our project to a children’s story also helped us to extend the range of the people that we explain our project.
We employed the analogy between synthetic biology and computer programming in the story. What led us to do this is the interest of many children in programming. Thus, using this analogy in our story made it more appealing.
Our team member Ayşenur Deniz Çayırtepe illustrated the book.
Below is placed the preface of our book to explain our mission better.
“We prepared this story book to introduce Synthetic Biology and its applications to younger generations in order to show them a whole different way of viewing and solving problems. We integrated our iGEM project idea to a real-life problem, which we know many people suffer from, to show how synthetic biology can be a tool to improve our lives. We thank the teams UFRGS, CPU, Tartu TUIT, Nantes, Ruperto Carola, Athens, IISc Bangalore, Botchan Lab, TU Eindhoven, TAU, Technion, Moscow, UPNA, LiU, and CCU for their contribution in translating this story book to their languages so that we can reach a bigger audience and inspire more young scientists. Thanks to their contribution, our book is also available in Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Bengali, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch, Basque, Spanish, Swedish, Taiwanese Mandarin, Russian in addition to Turkish and English.”
You can find the translated versions of the book in our Collaborations page.
Also, the other versions of the book are below:
JOURNAL CLUB
Starting from April 29, we organized Journal Club activities at our school where someone presents a scientific research article and we discuss about it. These activities have been really helpful for us to learn about different aspects of synthetic biology. Moreover, we reached several non-iGEMer people and introduced them synthetic biology. We have organized these activities once in a week for nine times.
In the first meeting of our Journal Club, our adviser Recep Erdem Ahan presented the article "Nucleic acid detection with CRISPR-Cas13a/C2c2” by Jonathan S. Gootenberg et al.
In the second meeting, our adviser Ebru Şahin Kehribar gave us tips and tricks for effectively reading and analyzing a scientific article. She used the article "Surface topology affects wetting behavior of Bacillus subtilis biofilms" by Moritz Werb et al. as a sample.
In the third meeting, a graduate student Nedim Hacıosmanoğlu from Synthetic Biosystems Lab which is our host lab presented the article "SelProm: A Queryable and Predictive Expression Vector Selection Tool for Escherichia coli" by Adrian J. Jervis et. al.
In the fourth meeting, one of our team members Mehmet Emin Bakar presented the article "Transposon-encoded CRISPR-Cas systems direct RNA guided DNA integration" by Sanne E. Klompe et. al.
In the fifth meeting, one of our team members Merve Nida Baştürk presented three articles of the company Synlogic. These articles are given below.
"Translational Development of Microbiome-Based Therapeutics: Kinetics of E. coli Nissle and Engineered Strains in Humans and Nonhuman Primates." by Kurtz C, et al. Clin Transl Sci. 2018. DOI: 10.1111/cts.12528
"Development of a synthetic live bacterial therapeutic for the human metabolic disease phenylketonuria." by Isabella VM, et al. Nat Biotechnol. 2018. DOI: 10.1038/nbt.4222
"An engineered E. coli Nissle improves hyperammonemia and survival in mice and shows dose-dependent exposure in healthy humans." by Kurtz CB, et al. Sci Transl Med. 2019. DOI:10.1126/scitranslmed.aau7975
In the sixth meeting, our team member Ömer Can Ergül presented the article Meta-omics analysis of elite athletes identifies a performance-enhancing microbe that functions via lactate metabolism" by Jonathan Scheiman et. al.
In the seventh meeting, our team member Doğuş Akboğa told us about the history of phage therapy, and presented the article "Engineered bacteriophages for treatment of a patient with a disseminated drug-resistant Mycobacterium abscessus" by Rebekah M. Dedrick et. al.
In the eighth meeting, our team member Ali Göktuğ Attar presented the article "Synthetic RNA-Based Immunomodulatory Gene Circuits for Cancer Immunotherapy" by Lior Nissim et. al.
In the ninth meeting, we discussed about the article "Remote control of therapeutic T cells through a small molecule-gated chimeric receptor.” by Wu CY, et al in the beautiful grass area of our campus.
We got in contact with the volunteers of Gönüllü Eğitim Projesi (Volunteer Tutoring Project) which is a sub project of Social Awareness Projects of our school, and asked them if we could arrange an interactive lesson for the 4th graders they bring to the school. We prepared a short and simple presentation about synthetic biology for them. They were all so interested in the topic and they asked lots of questions during the presentation, some of them being too hard for us to answer! After the presentation we showed them some bacteria images taken under microscope, and then showed them the quiet book we made.
Quiet book is an interactive book made of felt to help children have fun while learning. Our quiet book has 2 puzzle-like activities. One of them shows the double helix structure of DNA, and lets the children stick base pairs between the two strands. The second one has a bacteria on one page, and a jellyfish on the other. The idea of this one is to take a piece of DNA from the jellyfish and put it in the bacteria to see it glow.
After playing with the quiet book, we gave them the translated version of the “Engineer an Organism” booklet we’ve received from Washington iGEM Team. They were all so excited for the activities, and their enthusiasm pumped us up as well! We will meet them once again after we turn back from Giant Jamboree, and together we will look at the organisms they created with the activity booklet.
Moreover, as a part of our “Synthetic Biology for Everyone” concept, we reached out too one of the biggest Deaf Sports Foundations in Ankara, Turkey via one of our team members, Doğuş Akboğa who is fluent in both Turkish and International Sign Languages, to learn about the hardships they face in their life, as well as to learn if they have easy access to communication in case of a medical problem.
We prepared a two-part presentation with the grammar of Turkish Sign Language and heavy of visual content so that they can understand better. In the first part, we presented why diabetes mellitus occurs and is an important issue to study as a scientist. Some of the participants also suffer from type 2 diabetes, so we mutually exchange knowledge about the issue.
In the second part, we mentioned about synthetic biology, which is a subject none of them were aware of. We talked on how engineering principles are used in biology and how synthetic biology can provide an alternative perspective on the issues that humans encounters in their daily life.
Also, we talked about our project and how we used those principles to generate a living therapeutics so that diabetes has an alternative therapy. After the presentation, we played 101 Okey with them and had some fun.
