Building with Biology Todays activities Introduction to Synthetic - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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 Test Learn

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.

Resistor LED Wire Battery

Green fluorescent protein Origin of Replication

Promoter DNA VS Electrical SynBiological

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

Clippers Batteries Breadboard Wire LED Switch Resistor By the end of today hopefully you’ll have learned the synthetic biology equivalents of all these parts!

Preparation: Breadboards

Horizontal lines are connected But not across the divider! Circuits need to be closed, make sure you don’t short your components!

Pr Preparat ation: Cloning

Cloning means putting pieces of DNA together.

Synthetic Biologists use Restriction Enzymes to cut DNA… … we’ll use clippers to prepare our wires for

• ur circuits.

1st

st Simple ci

circu cuit: Fluorescent Proteins

Synthetic Biologists use Fluorescent proteins to visualise phenotypes…

These proteins

• riginally came

from jellyfish!

GFP RFP YFP ….we’ll use LEDs to visualise our circuit’s output

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!

2nd 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!

2nd circuit: Inducible Fluorescence

Synbiological Electrical We use inducible promoters so that our fluorescent proteins are

• nly expressed when we add our

chemical. Using the circuit diagram see if you can build an inducible switch circuit!

3rd Circuit: Crack the code: AND gate

In order to build biological supercomputers or even

• rganisms 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:

3rd Circuit: Crack the code: AND gate

Now see if you can figure out how to build an AND gate from the electrical circuit! Solution: Electrical

4th 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:

4th 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

Inte nternat ational Gen enetically Eng ngine ineered d Mac achine hines

• 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

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… … an electrical engineering analogy?

Targeted binding Cargo delivery and destruction

Questions + Career discussion

• Any questions?
• About ou
• ur wor
• rk… about Sy

Synthetic Biology… about st studying at UCL… about lif life as as a a resear archer?

Thanks for listening!

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