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Synthetic biology and bioengineering have made incredible impacts on the scientific community and the world at large already; even so, it is still a budding field. In order for it to continue to flourish, it is imperative that we educate the public on these fields and the work we do within them.

Synthetic Biology Education for Younger Generations

Global warming and climate change is a serious issue that undoubtedly affects everyone on the planet. However, the responsibility of taking the steps necessary to change the future of the planet is one that falls heavier on the shoulders of the next generation.

For this reason, we chose to create outreach and educational opportunities to connect with the younger students in our community and educate them about the impacts we hope to make on the world.

Bioengineering Day and Senior Design

We have presented this work at the UCSD Bioengineering Day 2023 and will be presenting once more at Bioengineering Day in 2024. This event is the biggest Bioengineering event at UCSD and serves as an essential component for the education all UCSD Bioengineering students (seniors and juniors) receive. In order to further contribute to the education of UCSD Bioengineering students, we also gave an oral presentation about our project to the Senior class in 2023 and will be doing so again in 2024.

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Poster presented at UCSD Bioengineering Day 2023.

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Scroll to view slides presented as a supplement to the Capstone Project presentation.
Along with our oral presentation, we also fielded questions about what it takes to run a year-long project. In this way, we are educating the future generations of Bioengineers about our project and its potential impact while also guiding them on how to run a successful Senior Design Capstone Project.

High School Outreach

To widen the reach of our educational outreach to even younger generations, we started an initiative to bring bioengineering and synthetic biology to high school students. As a result, we were fortunate to work with and be so warmly welcomed into the AP Biology Classroom of Mount Carmel High School in Poway, California!

Introduction to Synthetic Biology

For the first part of our lesson, we gave a general overview of the field of synthetic biology to the high school students. This section of the curriculum included background information about genomic research, genetic editing, and the various applications of synthetic biology that can be found both in niche research labs and in our day-to-day lives.

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Scroll to view slides used in the introduction section of our lesson.

Live Experimental Demonstration

In the next part of our outreach activities, we explained that in order to sequence, engineer, and insert DNA into an organism, we must first be able to acquire the DNA somehow. We then elaborated on the processes involved to do this, and gave a live demonstration of ethanol precipitation, which allowed us to extract DNA from samples of E. Coli that were cultured the night before.

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Scroll to view slides used in the demonstration section of our lesson.

Introducing iGEM and the MACS Project!

Lastly, we introduced iGEM and our MACS Project! In this segment of our presentation, we emphasized the severity of the global climate crisis, and the desperate need for a new form of carbon fixation to aid in removing the CO2 emissions from our atmosphere. We then gave background context as to what a minimal cell is and what the POAP pathway is, and the potential that these two components have together regarding their impact on the future of our planet.

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Scroll to view slides used in the iGEM section of our lesson.

We closed our presentation with a Q&A session with the students, who asked us about everything ranging from synthetic biology careers, academic paths, research experiences, and general biology. While the students had learned a lot about synthetic biology from us, through this experience the iGEM team learned to condense research material, organize and plan a curriculum, and deliver our content along with a demonstration to an audience.

Thank you to Mrs. Klingborg and the AP Biology students for a great educational experience!

Education in the Scientific Community

Build-A-Cell (SynCell2023)

We have also educated the scientific community about the minimal cell and our project! Our members presented our carbon fixation in the minimal cell model at the SynCell2023 conference in Minneapolis, Maine, U.S.A. This is an international conference that brings scientists of all backgrounds together to learn about each other’s research and avidly discuss the future directions of Synthetic Biology. By taking our research to scientific conferences other than iGEM, we are increasing the reach of our research; and by taking it to SynCell2023, specifically, we are putting ourselves and our research into the conversation about the future of synthetic biology. By educating the science community about the importance of carbon sequestration and the applications of the JCVI Minimal Cell, we are working to advance the fields of synthetic biology and Bioengineering.

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Poster presented at SynCell 2023.

Our abstract remains in the conference archive, easily accessible to anyone who wants to learn a short snippet of our research:

Poster Number 46

Review Manuscript

In addition to the presentations about our research, we have contributed to global science education by writing a scientific review on the “Recreation of a Synthetic Carbon Fixation Pathway in the Minimal Cell. This work discusses every aspect of our project in clear detail. We discuss the effects of increasing CO2 over the past few decades. We also discuss the importance and nature of the JCVI Minimal Cell, the differences between natural carbon fixation pathways as compared to the synthetic carbon fixation pathways currently in the field, and the POAP pathway in particular. We go on to write about the genetic tools and computational models that can be used for analyzing the efficacy of carbon fixation pathways in vitro versus in vivo versus in silico . This paper has been written with the intent of bringing together various concepts that are tied together as the background of our project. We have summarized and highlighted the key parts of our project that have already been worked on in the fields of bioengineering and synthetic biology. The paper is currently in review for Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.