Team:Exeter/Collaborations
Collaborations
Fun Palace - Oxford iGEM Team
We collaborated with the Oxford iGEM team to raise awareness about synthetic biology through the nationwide Fun Palace event. Fun Palace is an organisation that encourages communities to come together to celebrate art and science so we ran workshops there on extracting strawberry DNA to promote science to younger children in a way that would hopefully encourage them to take an interest in it in the long term. We both created surveys to gauge public interest in science and synthetic biology and to hear feedback on our own projects, then shared the results of these questionnaires with each other.
At the event, we hosted a strawberry DNA extraction event to spread awareness about synthetic biology. The strawberry DNA extraction was chosen because it is a simplistic and interactive experiment that people of all ages can get involved, which also aligns closely with the aims of the national Fun Palace event. We created a strawberry DNA protocol that we sent to the Oxford Team for them to follow at their own Fun Palace event. We wanted to learn what the general public thought about the event and about synthetic biology, but we also thought it was important to collect this information from more than one event. By sharing a questionnare with the Oxford team we could collate the answers to learn more about what the general public think about synthetic biology, allowing other iGEM teams to learn from this when hosting other synthetic biology focused events.
To see the strawberry protocol, the Fun Palace risk assessment and the survey that we shared click the buttons below!
The results of the survey collected from the Fun Palace event were incredibly interesting and are shown below:
From these results and people's feedback about Oxford iGEM's poster about genetic engineering, the following generalised observations were collected:
Most people have only heard about genetic engineering through media outlets and are aware of the uses in crop modification (particularly with making crops more ‘robust’). Some people were aware of, and mentioned Dolly the sheep despite this being an example of cloning not genetic engineering or modification. This demonstrated to us the associations people have with the phrase ‘genetic engineering.’ People we spoke to tended to be wary of the use of genetic modification in most areas, but interestingly after talking to us about our project they were very keen for it to be used to tackle environmental problems. This could show us that the positive sides of genetic modification and genetic engineering should be publicised as opposed to negative articles that tend to be used in media outlets to get views. We found that people admitted to not knowing a great deal about genetic engineering but the opinions they had formed tended to be reasonably polarised, very for or very against! This was interesting as they had also claimed not to know very much about the subject despite having these strong opinions.
We shared these results with the Oxford team so that they could understand how people perceive synthetic biology and genetic engineering from the combined efforts of both the Exeter Team's survey and the Oxford Team's infographic poster.
Some direct quotes from the feedback boxes on the survey included:
Furthermore, from the results we can also see that 74% of the people who attended the strawberry DNA extraction event said they really enjoyed the event and 70% learnt something about DNA and genetic engineering! This was really positive feedback because we thoroughly enjoyed hosting the event and talking to people about genetic engineering and synthetic biology. As a team, we strongly believe in spreading awareness about the field of synthetic biology and destigmatising any perceptions that surround this area of academia!
This collaboration was really beneficial for us as we could receive both survey results, from our own team, and more in-depth general feedback from a the infographic poster shared with us by the Oxford Team. This collaboration showed us that the general public only really know about genetic engineering from the media and that the opinions surrounding this topic can be positive if the general public are aware of beneficial contextualised solutions that tackle real world problems!
Wiki Building Mentorship - Oxford and St Andrews iGEM Teams
A key collaboration for our team has been mentoring other teams who need help with wiki-building. We provided a document (see below) with a brief outline of how they could start building their wikis, and coached teams including St Andrews and Oxford on different components of the process. This collaboration was also very beneficial for members of our team who were new to using HTML and CSS to code websites, as it is well known that the best way to cement your own knowledge is to teach someone else. Teaching other teams wiki skills not only benefited them but developed our own skill set!
If you are on tablet, please click here to open the pdf.
Skills Exchange Day, Exeter-Oxford
The skills exchange day was organised as a result of noticing that both teams had expertise in an area in which the other team lacked training. This event provided to be far more useful than both teams had initially anticipated.
In the morning, Oxford iGEM brought Exeter iGEM into their lab and gave 1:1 mentoring to improve our lab skills. We learnt their method of transforming DNA from their particular strain of bacteria and were able to familiarise ourselves with the tools they had, which differed slightly from procedures we had done in our own lab. This also provided us with a deeper understanding of synthetic biology and experimental methods. This part of the day was beneficial for our team, as we have a large number of team members who had little wet-lab experience before this iGEM project!
A member of our team spent the afternoon refreshing Oxford members on web-development for their wiki. To make the most of the time we had, we started out by planning what we wanted to achieve and then began coding as well as touching up on some of the more advance areas of HTML and CSS. We developed a couple of designs for their homepage and made amendments to the navigation bar so that it was responsive. We also addressed issues regarding compliance with the wiki rules; some content on their page was not hosted on their site so we explained how they could do this for various files, fonts and scripts.
This collaboration was beneficial for both teams as it helped team members learn or refresh new skills that they hadn't experienced before the iGEM experience.
Biological Modelling - Manchester iGEM Team
Manchester University iGEM Team have a reputation of excellent modelling skills. Therefore, at the UK iGEM meet-up we asked the Manchester Team to collaborate with us and help us biologically model the amount of PETase or MHETase enzyme we would need to purify to achieve degradation of plastic. This was dependent on a couple of variables, including assumed enzyme activity/digestion rate, time left between washes for degradation to occur and the microplastic concentration in g/L. Other parameters used in calculation were sourced from a synthetic biology research paper entitled 'Enhanced Poly(ethylene terephthalate) Hydrolase Activity by Protein Engineering' published in December 2018.
The Manchester team gave us their initial calculations so that we could start the work in the biological wet-lab with ball-park figures in mind. Below is the spreadsheet sent to us by the Manchester Team detailing their 'back of the envelope calculations' to help us understand the factors we would need to consider whilst aiming for a final result of plastic degradation.
The Manchester Team also sent us some of the assumptions they had made whilst making these calculations:
"This models the amount of enzyme needed to digest over the course of a defined time period. This is not exclusive to PETase and could be adjusted to work with anything you have the kinetics for.The model assumes you're constantly digesting over the course of the time period and so calculates how much you need if you are going to continously digest such that everything is gone by the end of the time period. The model also assumes the microplastics are 100% PET digestable all with a constant rate. Furthermore the model assumes that the activity of the enzyme does not drop over the course of the time period."
This collaboration was very valuable for us at the very start of our project when we were considering the enzyme solution and how much we would need to put into our filtration system. It was also useful for our team as a lot of our team members had no experience with the biological side of the project and it gave a larger sense of context to our overall aim.
Sustainable Development Goals
We took part in the iGEMxSDGs Challenge, which aimed to spread awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the iGEM community. The SDGs of the United Nations aim to improve the world's situation by promoting prosperity, equality, peace and care for the environment. Organised by TAS Taipei, Costa Rica and Tuebingen, we collaborated with many iGEM teams to map our sustainable goals for our project.
The goals we chose to focus our project around are Clean Water and Sanitation, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action and Life Below Water. We believe that keeping these goals in mind as we designed and carried out our project were crucial to ensuring we focused on sustainable development.
