Building with Biology
Today’s activities • Introduction to Synthetic Biology • Building 4 electrical circuit synonymous to synthetic biological ones. • Ask questions!
The power of Synthetic Biology:
Design Build Learn Test
Circuits - Introduction Engineers commonly use electrical circuits to carry out functions, so do synthetic biologists! You’ve got common circuit symbols on your cheat sheet. Promoter Green fluorescent protein LED Resistor Electrical VS SynBiological DNA Wire Battery Origin of Replication
Circuits – A sense of scale While electrical circuits are usually visible to the human eye… Synbio circuits are small circular pieces of DNA called plasmids, which are stored in the cytoplasm of bacteria, they’re too small to see!
Materials - Electrical Wire Breadboard Batteries By the end of today hopefully you’ll have learned the synthetic biology Switch Resistor equivalents of all these parts! Clippers LED
Preparation: Breadboards Horizontal lines are connected But not across the divider! Circuits need to be closed, make sure you don’t short your components!
ation: Cloning Pr Preparat Cloning means putting pieces of DNA together. Synthetic Biologists use Restriction Enzymes to cut DNA… … we’ll use clippers to prepare our wires for our circuits.
st Simple ci 1 st circu cuit: Fluorescent Proteins Synthetic Biologists use Fluorescent proteins to visualise phenotypes… RFP GFP ….we’ll use LEDs YFP to visualise our These proteins circuit’s output originally came from jellyfish!
Bu Building t g the Ci Circuit : Fluorescent Proteins 1. Connect your battery 2. Use red wire to connect + end of battery to another point 3. Connect one side of the resistor on same horizontal line as wire 4. Connect other side of the resistor to different horizontal line 5. Connect + side of LED (long leg) to resistor 6. Connect – side of LED (short leg) to different horizontal line 7. Use wire to complete the circuit!
2 nd circuit: Inducible Fluorescence Synthetic Biologists use inducible fluorescence to see if a particular chemical is present… … that means bacteria with this circuit only glow if the chemical switches them on… … we’ll use switches to turn our electrical circuits on and off!
2 nd circuit: Inducible Fluorescence We use inducible promoters so that our fluorescent proteins are only expressed when we add our chemical. Synbiological Using the circuit diagram see if you can build an inducible switch circuit! Electrical
3 rd Circuit: Crack the code: AND gate In order to build biological supercomputers or even organisms that can carry out basic logic, we need to be able to encode logic gates such as: AND and OR gates. Here’s an AND gate in synthetic biology:
3 rd Circuit: Crack the code: AND gate Now see if you can figure out how to build an AND gate from the electrical circuit! Electrical Solution:
4 th Circuit: Crack the code: OR gate OR gates are useful in synthetic biology if you want your circuit to activate in the presence of either one chemical OR the other. Here’s an OR gate in synthetic biology:
4 th Circuit: Crack the code: OR gate Now see if you can figure out how to build an OR gate from the electrical circuit! Electrical Solution:
We need to store all these Parts and information and characterization (testing information) of them… - Modularisation - Standardisation
Our work - In Intr troduc ducing ing iGE iGEM - Non-profit organisation based in MIT - Born from the need to standardise synthetic biology - The iGEM Registry - International Synthetic Biology Competition - Giant Jamboree in Boston, Massachusetts Inte nternat ational Gen enetically Eng ngine ineered d Mac achine hines
Our work – UC UCL iGE iGEM 2019 2019 We are UCL’s iGEM team! Engineering bacteria to produce encapsulins – tiny bacterial compartments – to deliver drugs… Targeted binding Cargo delivery and destruction … an electrical engineering analogy?
Questions + Career discussion - Any questions? - About ou our wor ork … about Sy Synthetic Biology … about st studying at UCL … about lif life as as a a resear archer ? Thanks for listening! Thanks to our sponsors:
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