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BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit

Hands-on demonstrations greatly enhance the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts and foster engagement and exploration in the sciences. While numerous chemistry and physics classroom demonstrations exist, few biology demonstrations are practical and accessibl...

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Autores principales: Huang, Ally, Nguyen, Peter Q., Stark, Jessica C., Takahashi, Melissa K., Donghia, Nina, Ferrante, Tom, Dy, Aaron J., Hsu, Karen J., Dubner, Rachel S., Pardee, Keith, Jewett, Michael C., Collins, James J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: American Association for the Advancement of Science 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070312/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30083608
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat5105
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author Huang, Ally
Nguyen, Peter Q.
Stark, Jessica C.
Takahashi, Melissa K.
Donghia, Nina
Ferrante, Tom
Dy, Aaron J.
Hsu, Karen J.
Dubner, Rachel S.
Pardee, Keith
Jewett, Michael C.
Collins, James J.
author_facet Huang, Ally
Nguyen, Peter Q.
Stark, Jessica C.
Takahashi, Melissa K.
Donghia, Nina
Ferrante, Tom
Dy, Aaron J.
Hsu, Karen J.
Dubner, Rachel S.
Pardee, Keith
Jewett, Michael C.
Collins, James J.
author_sort Huang, Ally
collection PubMed
description Hands-on demonstrations greatly enhance the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts and foster engagement and exploration in the sciences. While numerous chemistry and physics classroom demonstrations exist, few biology demonstrations are practical and accessible due to the challenges and concerns of growing living cells in classrooms. We introduce BioBits™ Explorer, a synthetic biology educational kit based on shelf-stable, freeze-dried, cell-free (FD-CF) reactions, which are activated by simply adding water. The FD-CF reactions engage the senses of sight, smell, and touch with outputs that produce fluorescence, fragrances, and hydrogels, respectively. We introduce components that can teach tunable protein expression, enzymatic reactions, biomaterial formation, and biosensors using RNA switches, some of which represent original FD-CF outputs that expand the toolbox of cell-free synthetic biology. The BioBits™ Explorer kit enables hands-on demonstrations of cutting-edge science that are inexpensive and easy to use, circumventing many current barriers for implementing exploratory biology experiments in classrooms.
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spelling pubmed-60703122018-08-06 BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit Huang, Ally Nguyen, Peter Q. Stark, Jessica C. Takahashi, Melissa K. Donghia, Nina Ferrante, Tom Dy, Aaron J. Hsu, Karen J. Dubner, Rachel S. Pardee, Keith Jewett, Michael C. Collins, James J. Sci Adv Research Articles Hands-on demonstrations greatly enhance the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts and foster engagement and exploration in the sciences. While numerous chemistry and physics classroom demonstrations exist, few biology demonstrations are practical and accessible due to the challenges and concerns of growing living cells in classrooms. We introduce BioBits™ Explorer, a synthetic biology educational kit based on shelf-stable, freeze-dried, cell-free (FD-CF) reactions, which are activated by simply adding water. The FD-CF reactions engage the senses of sight, smell, and touch with outputs that produce fluorescence, fragrances, and hydrogels, respectively. We introduce components that can teach tunable protein expression, enzymatic reactions, biomaterial formation, and biosensors using RNA switches, some of which represent original FD-CF outputs that expand the toolbox of cell-free synthetic biology. The BioBits™ Explorer kit enables hands-on demonstrations of cutting-edge science that are inexpensive and easy to use, circumventing many current barriers for implementing exploratory biology experiments in classrooms. American Association for the Advancement of Science 2018-08-01 /pmc/articles/PMC6070312/ /pubmed/30083608 http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat5105 Text en Copyright © 2018 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) , which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Articles
Huang, Ally
Nguyen, Peter Q.
Stark, Jessica C.
Takahashi, Melissa K.
Donghia, Nina
Ferrante, Tom
Dy, Aaron J.
Hsu, Karen J.
Dubner, Rachel S.
Pardee, Keith
Jewett, Michael C.
Collins, James J.
BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
title BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
title_full BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
title_fullStr BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
title_full_unstemmed BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
title_short BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
title_sort biobits™ explorer: a modular synthetic biology education kit
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6070312/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30083608
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat5105
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