Team:William and Mary/Partnership

• Home
• Project
  • Description
  • Design
  • Engineering Success
  • Proposed Implementation
  • Proof of Concept
• Model
• Judging
  • Medal Requirements
  • Contribution
• Collaborations
• Team
  • Meet the Team
  • Attributions
  • Notebook
• Safety
• Outreach
  • Human Practices
  • Education & Public Engagement
• Excellence in Another Area
• Partnership

Partnership

While not one of the Gold medal requirements we focused heavily on this year, as we mainly focused on the Integrated Human Practices, Project Modeling, Proof of Concept, Science Communications and “Excellence in Another Area” requirements, we worked with Purdue iGEM this season to develop open source educational resources for students at the high school level.

We worked with Purdue iGEM on their “Breaking Down Synthetic Biology” YouTube video series designed to educate high school students on the basics of synthetic biology. Over the course of several weeks, we wrote a 3-page script and recorded a voiceover for a video on promoters. There was back-and-forth communication involved between our team and individuals during the script writing process, as we edited our script based on feedback from the Purdue and Ohio State iGEM teams. The feedback we received helped our team to create a script that was well-suited for a high school audience and that contributed to the development of open-source educational resources in areas related to synthetic biology. We also reviewed a video script written for another video in the series.

Our script provided a definition for a promoter region, explained the major differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic promoters, and discussed various types of promoters such as constitutive and inducible. The script also detailed the four types of control that can act upon inducible promoters: positive inducible, positive repressible, negative inducible, and negative repressible. Furthermore, we described the categorization of promoters as endogenous, heterologous, and synthetic, and gave explanations of each term in the context of these promoters. Our script also included applications of constitutive and inducible promoters commonly used in the field of synthetic biology, and emphasized the importance of their incorporation in synthetic systems. Finally, we included examples of the applications of promoters in bioengineering, such as the use of the MerR operon to detect environmental mercury.