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.

Contents of the Flyers

Flyers evaluation

An understanding and consideration of the public perception of our Human Practice work is essential to ensure that we have achieved our objective.

To estimate the educational impact of our flyers, we organized a meeting with 14 students (Graduate and PhD) from various backgrounds (life, engineer and computer science). All of them were completely external to our project and studying in fields non related to synthetic biology.

We prepared a quiz to be given to all participants to evaluate their interdisciplinary knowledge. Three major axes were then focused on:

1. Experimental and theorical aspects of a synthetic biology project (we took our system as a study case).
2. Interdisciplinarity in synthetic biology.
3. Composition of the flyers (contents and design).

The experiment was conducted in this way:

• Students were divided into two groups: group (A) received the flyers and group (B), as negative control, did not receive them.
• In each group, the participants were paired (Biologist-Modeler) in order to study the interaction aspect.
• Groups were physically departed to prevent contact during the test.
• The quiz was given to all participants. And at the same time, the flyers were given to the group A.
• All the participants were monitored during the test.
• The answers of the quiz were collected after 45 minutes.

At the end of the test, we also gave the flyers to the participants of group B and ask them whether they would have been useful. Finally, we invited all the participants to debate about interdisciplinarity in such a discipline.

By collecting their different opinions and analyzing the videos, we made the following conclusions:

1. Participants of group B (without flyers) showed more difficulties than those of group A to interact and to understand the questions.
2. During the test the flyers were read several times by group A participants, revealing their utility as educational support.
3. The importance of modeling in synthetic biology needed to be more explicitly represented on our flyers. We completed them in this way. The new version is given here.
4. All the participants were convinced that biologists and modelers have to work closely together in order to carry out a project in synthetic biology, concluding that the vision and applications of this emerging field will certainly influence many other scientific and engineering disciplines.

The positive feedback received from the participants encouraged us to renew this experience with 10 students coming from Paris Descartes University by collaborating with the iGEM Paris Bettencourt 2011 team. These students have freshly integrated the Master called "Interdisciplinary Approach of Living" (AIV: Approche Interdisciplinaire du Vivant) from the Center of Interdisciplinary Research (CIR).

The Quiz conditions were similar to those realized in Grenoble, except that for practical reasons, we have prepared numerical quiz. Students could then answered the questions on line.

Concerning the answers about the mechanism of the genetic system, we found that students from group A (Test with flyers) give more precise answers, which is in concordance with the previous results obtained in Grenoble. The interaction between students will be studied soon after analyzing the videos documents.

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.