Team:SJTU-BioX-Shanghai/Human practice 2

Human Practice 2

Motivation

iGEM is a world-wide competition hold mainly by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technolo-gy )who calls the undergraduate students all over the world to learn and fulfill the idea on syn-thetic biology through competition and what’s more follow their dream on the academic field. This year, to make it easier for High School teams to share in the fun of Synthetic Biology and iGEM, a high school division of this game has just been hold.

Project

In order to promote synthetic biology and iGEM, we decided to give a presentation to a senior school Biology Olympic Competition class; members of which have great interests in the biology and basic knowledge on genetic engineering and microbiology. And then we design a question-naire to exam the efficiency of the presentation and survey their ideas on the synthetic biology and attitude to join the iGEM high school divisoin. We believe that understanding their mind and attitudes would be greatly useful for the development of iGEM. During the presentation, we give them a brief introduction of the basic knowledge,research strategy , application and industrialization of synthetic biology.

Furthermore, we also introduced several interesting iGEM projects such as the bacteria which eat the alkaline (2010 TU_Delft) and the bacteria which detect the nitrogen (BCCS-Bristol). In the end of the presentation, we introduced our iGEM project this year in a plain way. With the help of the presentation and their basic knowledge on the synthetic biology, they have a very clear idea about what iGEM is like as well as our project when we finished.

Q: How to avoid the mischarging of tRNA, if we introduce tRNA and aaRS pair? A: The mischarging can be avoided by the aaRS’s ability to recognize the other parts of the tRNA than anticodon . (We put it in a plain way so that they can understand it with ease) Q: What is the application of the project? A: For example, sometimes changing amino-acid on active center of an enzyme would have a great effect on enzyme activity. Our project provides an easy way to introduce point mutation at the active center.