Team:HKUST-Hong Kong/human.html

Human
Practice

Overview

Synthetic Biology is an emerging field combining conventional Biology with engineering principles. Employing techniques rooted in genetic engineering, scientists attempt to introduce new biological functions to existing organisms, ranging from creating biosensors to detect viruses and bacteria, to those which can actively degrade pollutants in the environment. Since this is a relatively new field of area, our iGEM team members, should not only learn and enjoy from our research experience, but also try to promote synthetic biology to the general public so that more people will have a better understanding of this new area.

In order to achieve this goal, this year, our human practice group of iGEM 2011 HKUST Team held a Synthetic Biology Workshop for secondary school students on 17th, Sept, 2011.

Apart from the workshop, our human practice group also modified a Synthetic Biology Survey originally from Austria for the Hong Kong public. We want to collect data from this survey to get the general public’s perception of synthetic biology, what influences their impression about it and their thought of the future development of synthetic biology.

2.iGEM 2011 HKUST Synthetic Biology Workshop

The iGEM 2011 HKUST Synthetic Biology Workshop aims at introducing some basic idea of synthetic biology and sharing knowledge of Synthetic Biology to the secondary school students at Grade 9 and 10.

Base on this goal, we design our workshop into 4 parts. The first part is a brief introduction to what Synthetic Biology is, and then we design two games aimed to enhance the students’ understanding of synthetic biology and also encourage their interaction with iGEM team members. There is also a tour to the laboratory where our iGEM team members work. At the end, a sharing session is held to provide chances for secondary students to share their opinions about this workshop and their understanding of Synthetic Biology.

Introduction of Synthetic biology One of our team advisors, Julie Lin, gave a brief introduction of what synthetic biology is at the beginning of the workshop. This introduction helps students have a basic idea and some knowledge of the synthetic biology. For example, we talk about what is gene and how to modify gene by introducing the basic knowledge of transcription, translation and PCR. Also we inspire the students to answer some questions during the introduction to help them understand synthetic biology more easily.

Activity 1 : The Life of Ecoli

Our human practice group has designed a card game for secondary students in order to introduce the general principles of Synthetic Biology and the techniques employed in this field. In this card game, students put themselves in the position of an E. coli, a bacterial species often used in Synthetic Biology due to its fast growth rate, resilience to environmental stress and ease of cultivation. Throughout the game, students attempt to evolve by constructing pathways (a promoter with a gene). By activating promoters and pathways, they will score points, which are tallied at the end, with the highest scorer declared the winner.

After playing this game, students can know the metabolic control and synthetic pathways. For example, they will know promoters need to be activated to initiate gene transcription, different genes code for different proteins with distinct functions and also some techniques commonly used in constructing pathways such as PCR.

You can see the detailed information of the card game through this link:

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Continue with Workshop's report