Developing a solution

To resolve this communication difficulty and to facilitate the understanding and collaboration between us (modelers and biologists), we have developed an interdisciplinary communication tool.

For this purpose we prepared two educational flyers:

• Flyer "Modelling for biologist" which was realized by the biologists of our team under the supervision of the modelers, in order to explain the essentials of mathematical modelling approaches to other biologists.
• Flyer "Synthetic Biology for modellers" performed by the members of our team involved in computer modelling, under the supervision of the biologists and aimed at explaining the basics of genetics to other fellow modelers.

Swapping the roles of the team members during the realization of the flyers allowed us to include the point of view of “non-experts” and to focus on essential points which often appear trivial and therefore unimportant to the experts.

Interest for the iGEM community

Interest for iGEM community ?! Sure !! Since the strength of iGEM teams often reposes on bringing together a critical mass of expertise in different disciplines, we developed flyers that can foster the communication between experts and thus enhance their work efficiency. Especially during the initial phases of the project, the flyers could boost interdisciplinary work within mixed teams. It therefore makes sense to integrate them in the iGEM KIT so as to make them available to the iGem community right from the start.

As an educational tool, universities or high schools can also use the flyers. They help explaining the basics of synthetic biology and pinpoint the complementarity between experimental and theoretical approaches in engineering.

Content of the Flyers

Flyers evaluation

To estimate the educational impact of our flyers, we organized a meeting with 46 students (mostly Undergraduate, Graduate and PhD) from various backgrounds (Life Sciences, Physics and Electronic Engineering and Computer Sciences). None of them was involved in our project and synthetic biology was for most of them unheard of. Three quiz sessions were held on August 20th/October 25th in Grenoble and on September 20th in Paris. The session in Paris involved the collaboration with iGEM Paris Bettencourt 2011 team and they recruited students from the Master Interdisciplinary Approach of the Living (AIV: Approche Interdisciplinaire du Vivant) from the Center of Interdisciplinary Research (CIR) at Paris Descartes University.

We prepared a quiz to evaluate the content and the efficiency of our flyers in promoting interdisciplinary communication skills.

Conclusion

From this experience, we learned how to overcome interaction difficulties between scientists of different fields and foster efficient communication between team members. The interdisciplinary approach of synthetic biology helped us to enlarge our views on topics that are indeed closely related to our work in iGEM, but that we sometimes forget when we are just ‘doing science and engineering.

Concretely, improving communication between modelers and biologist of the team made us realize the necessity to:

1. Characterize the initial state of the system.
2. Identify the crucial elements of the toggle switch and quorum sensing that should be measured.
3. Determine the necessary and sufficient set of parameters that specify the context and biological state of our system.