Berkeley Engineering Blogs

Well, as there is a large trend in synthetic biology to promote opensource learning, the thinkers and doers of synthetic biology (who can be called perhaps the “experts of” synthetic biology) publish their protocols and explanations of processes on a publicly accessible wiki (previously mentioned, called OpenWetWare).  You can learn how to do synthetic biology in your own garage here (in the form of tutorials), as long as you can afford enzymes and can get your hands on a pocket-sized convective pcr thermocycler or other cheap methods of doing PCR (machines which basically just heat up and cool down the DNA in a specific regimen so that it separates and then reconnects, or anneals, to exponentially replicate, or amplify, one piece of DNA).

The iGemmers on the Berkeley team had to go through these tutorials and receive lectures (like this one) to become part of the team (as well as think of their own project ideas).  But once they’ve gotten down to business, learning synthetic biology looks more like this:

“This is how we learn synthetic biology:  we scribble on random pieces of paper.”

And there’s an awful lot of data input involved with doing synthetic biology research.  The iGemmers have to keep track of what has been manipulated and how it will fit into the next step of the process.

Dry Ice Shenanigans:

In the above video, you can get a look at what what happens when you spend a little too much time in the lab and have some extra dry ice on your hands…

Of course, most of the researchers involved with Berkeley’s iGEM team are undergraduates who have had some experience learning bioengineering or microbiology basics (many of them cite Terry Johnson’s bioengineering class on tissue engineering at UC Berkeley as what got them interested in synthetic biology in the first place), but synthetic biology theoretically aims to make itself accessible to anyone who has interest and little bit of knowledge about biology, in order to allow for a greater possibility of innovation in the fields of medicine and energy.  This topic of opensource touches on the issues of biosafety, biosecurity, and preparedness within the lab, which I will discuss at length on a later post.