Education
We designed a course for introducing synthetic biology to college students form different apartments. The professor Lee had a lecture to show how synthetic biology works and the iGEM competition, helping students from different field get to know much about iGEM and how interesting.
Discussion
We held a debate on the safety of the project this year. This year we use E. coli to be the host to carry the thermo devices, and producing biological fuel by step-dependent pathway. It has potential to solve the energy problem..
Experiment experience
We design a fundamental experiment of synthetic biology. They experienced the microbiology and molecular biology experiment. In this way, they would reduce the fear about the gene modification project by understanding the novel field.
Questionnaire survey
We design a questionnaire survey to figure out what university students think about Synthetic biology. Thus we created a questionnaire survey online affording some information of synthetic biology and invited 301 university students to fill the questionnaire survey (Check the website; the following is our questionnaire and statistical data.
Hello, We are the NCTU-Formosa team from iGEM 2011, and we need your help to finish our project.
If you know what the Synthetic biology is, you can answer the questions directly.
If you don’t know, please read the introduction and help us to finish the questionnaire survey.
Introduction of Synthetic biology & IGEM
Synthetic biology is a new area of biological research that designs and builds novel biological systems. It includes the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing natural biological system for better application. Over the last century, advances in the field of biology have transformed life sciences. Synthetic biology, a new branch of biology, studies how to build artificial biological systems for engineering applications, using many of the same strategies that electrical engineers use to make computer chips. Drawing upon powerful techniques for the rapid assembly of DNA, synthetic biologists focus on taking apart natural biological systems, simplifying them, and using them as parts of a synthetic, unnatural, engineered biological system.
The goal of synthetic biology is to modify the behavior of organisms and engineer them to perform new tasks. The potential applications of this new field include creating bioengineered microorganisms that can produce pharmaceuticals, break down chemical waste, repair damaged genes, and produce biofuel and electricity. The essence of synthetic biology is that techniques used to build non-biological systems in the engineering and computational sciences could be used to build novel synthetic biological systems that solve practical problems. It incorporates elements from many different disciplines including chemistry, biology, mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science.
The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a worldwide
Synthetic Biology competition aimed at
undergraduate university students. One of the aims of the competition is to attempt to build simple biological systems from standard, interchangeable parts and operate them in living cells.
The iGEM competition facilitates this by providing a library of standardized parts (called
BioBrick standard biological parts) to students, and asking them to design and build genetic machines with them. Student teams can also submit their own BioBricks. Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression.
Yes [80] 27%
A little [175] 58%
No [18] 6%
I have already known [28] 9%
2. Do you think whether the Synthetic biology is a potential science?
Yes [187]62%
Normal [109]36%
No [5]2%
3. What do you think which following option is that Synthetic biology can be stretched?
Medicines [233] 77%
Regeneration energy [207] 69%
Cosmetics [133] 44%
Disease examination [229] 76%
Environmental (about biopesticide…etc.) [210] 70%
4. The following is our topic of 2011 IGEM competition, do you think this topic is highly practical?
Yes [202] 67%
Normal [89] 30%
No [10] 3%
5. Are you advocating the research of Synthetic biology?
Yes [287] 95%
No [14] 5%
6. Which one is your background related?
Humanities/Business/Law/History/Geography major [59] 20%
Math/Physics/Chemistry/Engineering major. [90] 30%
Biology/ Medical science/Agricultural science major [134] 45%
Other [18] 6%
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