Team:William and Mary/Human Practices
Integrated Human Practices
Engaging in constructive, bidirectional conversations with community members and experts throughout all aspects of our project—both the wet lab project and the outreach and education component—guided our direction and focused our project applications. To inform our wet lab project, we consulted experts in biofilms, biomaterials, and medicine. We also discussed our project with the general public through our public engagement events. However we maintain that Integrated Human Practices are as important for outreach and education projects as they are for wet lab. We therefore made a concerted effort to engage in ongoing conversations with experts and stakeholders in education. We shared our strategies and materials for outreach and education with consumers of our resources and received valuable feedback for rendering them more accessible, useful, and effective, and ensuring that they would reach traditionally underserved communities.
Integrated Human Practices: Wet Lab Project Focus
Public Engagement (June 2019)
We began our integrated human practices in June with discussions with the general public at our community outreach events (see Community Outreach Events tab for detailed descriptions of these). It is clear from a review of the literature that the majority of research conducted on biofilms aims to prevent or destroy them because of their ability to cause infections, biofouling, and other negative properties. We were able to connect with the public during STEM Exploration day where we presented a poster introducing synthetic biology and our team. This unfavorable perception of biofilms is reflected by the public due to the relative lack of research describing the strength and untapped potential of biofilms. This communication encouraged us to develop a balanced view about the positive and negative effects of biofilms, while focusing on project on harnessing the unique, beneficial properties of biofilms.
Advice from the Medical Community (June 2019)
To gain insight from an expert in the medical field who frequently encounters the negative properties of biofilms, in June we consulted Dr. Ramon Estaban, an orthopedic surgeon, about the way biofilms affect his clinical practice. When asked about the challenges biofilms present, he responded, “biofilm is a bad word in orthopedics.” He encounters prosthetic joint infections (PJI) in which bacteria exist on the prosthetic surface in a biofilm. The bacteria form a biofilm because it allows them to adhere to the metal surface of the prosthetic. Forming a biofilm also provides a barrier to antibiotics and a favorable environment for the virulent bacteria to grow. The most common bacteria in acute PJIs is Staph Aureus. Most are methicillin sensitive, but the number of methicillin resistant strains are increasing. When treating a prosthetic joint infection, he removes the implant and removes as much of the infectious biofilm as possible, but often times a small piece will be left behind which holds on to infection. Currently, there aren’t any proven prosthetic design factors or surgery techniques which decrease the chance of infection.
Our biofilms are very different from the strains which cause prosthetic joint infections, but there are still concerns about their use in medicine because they are often centers for antibiotic resistance. This medical perspective focused our efforts on being able to control biofilms and harness their beneficial properties, and inspired us to explore ways in which our engineered biofilms could be applied to medicine. These discussions led to a reframing our our project to focus more on biofilms as living materials that may mitigate some of their more deleterious effects.
Discussions with Expert in the Field of Biofilms as Living Materials (July 2019)
As our project progressed, we began searching for new ways to increase the strength of our biomaterials and improve our toolkit. We reached out to Dr. Neel Joshi, a leading expert in biofilm engineering from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute, after reading his paper that developed a mercury-sensitive curli operon. In July we participated in a Skype call with Dr. Joshi. During our consultation, he advised our team on ways to include curli fibers in our engineered biofilms, reinforce our biomaterials by using curli fibers and cellulose, and how to engineer the curli operon.
We were interested in whether the ribosome binding sites on the curli operon were wild type or synthetic. He clarified that none of the RBS’s are synthetic, and they were all lifted from the chromosome. We were able to replicate this technique while engineering our curli operon.
When we were able to create a curli operon, how would could curli production be increased? Means to upregulate curli fiber production include maximising the amount of curli production through recombinant protein expression and, for a more sustained production, using a weaker RBS or promoter so the cells can produce curli without becoming stressed. Another option for further strengthening our biomaterials is to use cellulose produced by the BCS gene.
We also discussed applications of engineered biofilms and curli fibers. His recommendations for future research and applications include the creation of bio-plastics, creation of biomaterials with specific binding capabilities, and potential uses in gut therapy by using curli fibers to reduce inflammation.
His lab sent us the plasmid pBbB8k-csgBACEFG which is an arabinose inducible synthetic curli operon. In our experiments, we used this operon as a positive control for robust curli fiber expression. His research heavily guided the designing of our curli operon and the execution of our curli fiber experiments.
Integrated Human Practices: Outreach and Education Focus
As stated above, we felt that it was imperative to engage the public not only in aspects of our wet lab project, but also to improve the impact and effectiveness of our outreach and education projects. We consulted experts and other stakeholders in education and outreach, including the public, educational experts, and even campus administrators. These meetings and feedback inspired our community engagement and education goals, and will continue to impact our involvement on campus and beyond.
William & Mary Admissions (June 2019) (July 2019)
In order to discuss methods to increase knowledge of the discipline of synthetic biology on campus and expand our reach beyond the Williamsburg community we met with Dominic Burkett, the Dean of Admissions for the Tidewater region. Most students on our campus are unaware of iGEM and synthetic biology. We strategized ways to improve our visibility including improving our social media, writing new material for the William & Mary website, and participating in admissions events. To expand our reach beyond Williamsburg, we discussed reaching out to more high schools in the Tidewater area (for which Dean Burkett has extensive knowledge) and creating a flyer advertising iGEM and opportunities to become involved in synthetic biology. Based on this meeting, we will grow our high school visits beyond our established Williamsburg program, improve accessibility to our iGEM team on campus, and participate in more events for potential students.
Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis (QUBES) (July 2019)
From July 14-19, we participated in the QUBES workshop, hosted at William & Mary, a meeting that focused on bringing data science into the undergraduate classroom. The QUBES (Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis) consortium is an organization which aims to address challenges in biology education and provide support to educators for integrating quantitative approaches into biology education. QUBES is a thriving community which promotes open source education by providing a platform to share resources between educators. QUBES mantra is: OEP – Open Education Practices, which dovetails with our goals as well. The team was thrilled to have the opportunity to participate in this workshop because the QUBES mission to advance collaborative, open source education aligned perfectly with our goals when creating our curriculum and OpenStax supplement. The theme of this workshop was examining the evolution from data to data science in the classroom and discussing ways to include data science in biology classes. Synthetic biology occupies a unique place to integrate big data into biology as a crossroads between engineering, genetics, and data science. The discipline increasingly requires more integration with data science as the availability of sequence data and modular synthetic DNA parts grows. This theme and awareness of the increasing use of data science in synthetic biology inspired our team to strategize ways in which synthetic biology is used as a hook to introduce data science into the undergraduate classroom.
With this goal in mind, we created five activities that integrate synthetic biology and data science. We presented a poster at the conference which featured the five activities and discussed the motivation behind teaching synthetic biology and integrating synthetic biology and data in the classroom. This presentation provided the opportunity to engage with a new community while receiving feedback on our educational materials. Our poster and materials were even featured as the QUBES Resource of the Week. We were able to network with dozens of professors while presenting our poster and discussed the variety of ways our materials could be easily introduced to the classroom and adapted to suit many levels of higher education. In particular, we receive excellent feedback from Dr. Pat Marsteller at Emory University.
Merci Best, CEO of STEAMtrix LLC (July 2018)
We hosted Merci Best, to discuss the importance of STEM, diversity in STEAM, and improving open source education. STEAM is the teaching concept which encompasses science, technology, engineering, art and design, and mathematics. Her company STEAMtrix works to improve STEM self efficacy and encourages students to make connections between what they are interested in and how it involves STEM.
Her knowledge of creating inclusive STEM education was a wonderful resource for developing our curriculum. With her consultation, we developed the curriculum to focus on engaging students through experiments and hands on learning.
Nathan Martin from “Nevertheless” Pearson Publishing Co. (July 2019)
We skyped with a representative from Nevertheless, a podcast developed by Pearson which features women who are using technology to transform their field. We were originally interested in this outreach platform as it relates to our goals to expand our outreach, however we were excited to have the opportunity to speak with a representative from a large “for profit” education company. During our call we discussed developing platforms to bolster the voices of women in STEM and he recommended organizations and people with whom to connect. We were then interested in how their outreach correlates with their “for profit” education status. Communicating with a representative from Pearson inspired our effort to synergize with continuing efforts to increase open source education by utilizing the OpenStax platform.
Jennifer Jones, Co-Founder of Women You Should Know (July 2019)
We communicated with Jennifer Jones, the co founder of Women You Should Know, to discuss increasing the visibility of women in STEM careers. Women You Should Know is a platform and diverse community dedicated to empowering professional women. We were originally interested in the company when we saw an article which featured artistic posters of women in STEM. We thought the posters would be wonderful resources to distribute during our school visits and engagement events. Our conversation inspired our goal to expand our outreach event targeted to young ladies, and gave us ideas for opportunities through Women You Should Know, including writing an article for their blog in the future.
Summary
For both the wet lab and the education and outreach component we engaged in Integrated Human Practices. In each case these ongoing bidirectional conversations with the public and with experts resulted in modifications to the direction of the project. This input not only enhanced the content of both the SmartFilms wet lab project and the outreach and education materials, but also rendered our projects more repsonsive to the needs of the community.