Integrated Human Practices

“Science is public, not private, knowledge”

~Robert K. Merton

Scientists have to to share their knowledge and ideas with others. This way, their ideas will evolve. This way, their projects become better than ever imagined. This way, they will change the world. To share our ideas we talked to experts from different fields, industry representatives and the general public. Especially the field of scientific communication fascinated us, because feedback considerably improves a project and it is impossible to get good feedback without proper understanding. To learn more about our science communications project, please visit our Education and public engagement site.

Experts

Dr. Mirko Himmel

Dr. Mirko Himmel is a biochemist working at the Research Group for Biological Arms Control at the Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Centre of Science and Peace Research at the University of Hamburg. We had several conversations over the course of our project with him about biosafety and biosecurity.

During the early stages of our work, we discussed our first ideas with Dr. Mirko Himmel. Several of them were sorted out partly due to safety issues. In the end we decided to develop a new tool for bacterial selection. Dr. Himmel especially found the complexity of the system fascinating, as it makes it particularly safe against misuse, while he was worried that the response time might be critical as an improvement for terrorists. Not only our lab project but also scientific communication was an important topic during our discussions. We mainly talked about the safety implications of an iGEM Wiki entirely translated into easy to understand language. After a heated discussion on the use of scientific language as a safety feature to encrypt potentially harmful information vs. open source and education related responsibilities we came to a conclusion: There is an indispensable need for open discussion on scientific projects outside of the research environment. For this discussion members of the general public have to grasp the issues on hand. Therefore understanding of key ideas and consequences is crucial. This is one of the reasons we designed our worldmap. Nevertheless Dual Use Research of Concern shouldn’t be highlighted in a commonly understandable way and the probability of potential misconduct has to be kept at the lowest possible level. Additionally the target audience has to be considered (in this case the iGEM community), so we decided against our initial idea to translate our wiki into common english. However this is not an excuse to stop explaining your scientific work. But in order to reach out to people, who have never heard of iGEM, additional media have to be considered.

Dr. Markus Große Ophoff

Markus Große Ophoff is a german chemist and the director of the Institution for Environment Communication at the German Federal Environmental Foundation. We had a productive conversation with him about how to communicate science to people who don’t get in touch with science in their daily life.

We invited Dr. Große Ophoff for an interview and a talk about science communication in the field of sustainability. Together with the junior-GBM, (the student group of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) we organized this open lecture for all students of the University of Hamburg. We acknowledge the importance of sustainability in our challenging time and wanted to give all students the possibility to thoroughly think about this topic. Communication is the key to convince reluctant sceptics about its importance and preserves life on earth as we know it. Besides this talk on a general topic, we also had an interview focussing our project. The real influence on our project we gained from this interview, in which we debated possibilities on how we can communicate science to the public. Dr. Große Ophoff gave us the advice to use pictures and metaphors (like lock-and-key for protein ligand interaction) which are not too childish. He also advised us to use emotions, because our brain is programmed to store data longer if it is linked to emotions, while raw facts are soon to be forgotten. A transcript of the full conversation can be read here, the summary with his advice can be found here.

Dr. Thomas Gorochowski

Dr. Thomas Gorochowski is a scientist for synthetic biology and complexity, who was originally trained in computer sciences. He worked at the University of Hamburg in collaboration with our primary investigator Prof. Dr. Ignatova on characterization of synthetic genetic circuits using RNA sequences. We discussed the use of ribozymes in RNA regulated synthetic circuits with him.

Dr. Gorochowski held a talk for us and in the following interview we told him about our project. We considered putting the ribozyme RiboJ in front of our gate sequence to make translation more comparable between different promoters, by trimming the RNA in a particular manner that offers the same context for each promoter. He told us that his studies suggested, that the hairpin of the gate and the hairpin that is left by RiboJ restriction could interact with each other dependent on the distance between them. It is possible that this interaction negatively influences our gate. Therefore we decided not to use RiboJ in our gate plasmid to ensure that our gate works as predicted.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Torda

Prof. Dr. Andrew Torda is leader of a research group at the University of Hamburg, working on biomolecular modelling, for example protein structure prediction. We discussed the predicted protein structures with him as a part of our model.

As we came across the problem of the modified protein sequence of chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT), Prof. Dr. Torda discussed the predicted protein structures with us (for more information on the structures see model). He guided us through available online tools and helped us interpreting the results. Together we reasoned that the overall structure of CAT probably will not be affected. But he pointed out that the solubility might be influenced, because there are many hydrophobic amino acids in the sequence we have added. We conducted in vivo experiments and we found that CAT still seems to work, since the bacteria we transformed with it were resistant against chloramphenicol.

Dr. Alexander Green

Dr. Green built the riboswitches^[1],[2] our project is based on. He is an assistant professor of the Biodesign Institute at the Arizona State University. We discussed our first contradictory results with him and the following experimental strategy.

Our first results showed that the gate is not as tight as expected, since bacteria only transformed with gate sequence could survive on chloramphenicol, so we developed a new series of experiments with him. In these experiments we determined bacterial growth with higher antibiotic concentrations. Our results indicated that we still could use the gate, but at rather high concentrations of chloramphenicol to make it work optimal (for more details please visit our results site). We also discussed the slightly varied structure of our gate compared to the original one and possible consequences regarding a decreased translation. He pointed out that the added sequence could also imply a ribosome binding site or start codon, but estimated that this is highly unlikely with the given sequence (for more detail please visit our model site).

Industry

altona diagnostics

Besides discussing our projects with experts from research groups, we were also interested in finding out which opportunities our industrial partners see in our project. So we were delighted when altona diagnostic (one of our sponsors) invited us to present our project to their research and development department. They were very interested in our project and comprehended the possible implication, if our riboswitches would work. Additionally they had a completely different perspective on our research and raised question we have not thought about before, like how resistant our gate sequence is towards mutations. After this inspiring exchange of thoughts we realised that there is still much work to do before our idea can be used in an industrial context.

Team:Hamburg/Human Practices