Team:NTHU Taiwan/Contribution
Synthetic Biology Board Game
Synthetic biology is a unique field of research in biological science, it combines fundamental biology and engineering principles to build up new operational biological systems. The whole concept of part design is quite similar to playing building blocks since they aim to make novel creations based on existing bricks. Therefore, we launched a synthetic biology board game that provides a simple and entertaining way to learn microbiology and synthetic biology. Throughout playing, players can get some basic idea of how bacteria evolve different phenotypic traits to tackle the harsh environment, and how we add or remove these characters in the laboratory.
Podcast: The Road of iGEM
Attending the iGEM competition is a long long road, the whole process starts from member recruitment, followed by brainstorming, project implementation, wiki page design, and the final presentation. During the competition, the previous NTHU_Taiwan team members provided us with their precious experiences, which became a very strong support to our project. Since our journey of 2021 iGEM is coming to the end, we came up with a wonderful idea to pass down our own experience to the future iGEMer in Taiwan --- making an iGEM podcast! Once a week, we discuss a specific topic about iGEM in each episode, covering the introduction of synthetic biology, interesting iGEM projects, our lab work, and any other perspectives we would like to share. By listening to our podcast, the audience can have a rough understanding of the iGEM competition without any biology background. We also hope that this podcast can help future students to start up an iGEM project from scratch!
Parts for Plant Synthetic Biology
Plants cover a wide range of iGEM topics, such as agriculture, food, and the environment. However, few teams used plant synthetic biology to deal with these issues. This year, we worked on a dsRNA expression system in plants. We had done some research studies to make the best design, including optimal length of sense sequence, Agrobacterium strains, candidate plasmids, and strategies for secondary structure formation. These concepts help us to improve our constructs. As a result, we registered four long hairpin structure sequences on the part list. As we are pioneers of building the RNAi mechanism on plants among iGEM teams, we anticipate that future iGEMers will be inspired by our design and engage in perfect projects. In the future, plant synthetic biology may be applied to solve other plant diseases, making a better environment for human beings.
| Name | Description | Length |
|---|---|---|
| BBa_K3835000 | long hairpin for Prx gene | 2165 bp |
| BBa_K3835001 | long hairpin for BxPel gene | 2303 bp |
| BBa_K3835002 | long hairpin for Prx gene (short version) | 1485 bp |
| BBa_K3835003 | long hairpin for BxPel gene (short version) | 1485 bp |