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Project Description
background
Now is a time when science and art are more inclusive. For thousands of years, the symbiosis between human beings and technology has become increasingly high. Art has always been an essential means for human beings to reflect on and explore the meaning of life.
We are concerned that human activities have significantly impacted the earth we live on, so this project shows the thinking of the macro life and environment through the micro level of life.
"kill switch" is an artificial system that causes cell death under certain conditions. We have noticed that in other synthetic biology projects, the "kill switch" is often used to ensure the biosafety of the project.
our plan
Our team has designed a series of cell death procedures, programmed the control of life, and presented a series of "engineered bacterial death simulators" in the form of installation art, in which bacteria will perform life performances.
In Plan A, we designed A death pathway induced by ultraviolet (uv), to simulate A hole in the ozone layer caused by human activity from excessive exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays affect life on earth, The death of engineering bacteria intuitively alerts people that the earth's environment is wanton destruction and will, by itself, prompt people to put more power into protecting our survival of the ecological environment;
In Plan B, we designed the T4 lysis device - β-galactosidase suicide pathway to show the effect of lysis and blue color reaction, symbolizing artistically the tears of the Eye of Horus. With the mixture of a solution, the bacteria lysed and died while turning blue, slowly dripping from the container as if the tears of the Eye of the giant had fallen from the sky.
On the macro level, it is a visual spectacle. On the micro level, the apocalyptic aesthetics presented by the death of countless cells show the thinking of bioethics.
why artists kill
The "kill switch" is a commonly used synthetic biology method, and people may empathize with the death of mice in the laboratory. However, the more different life from humans, the more difficult it is for us to realize his "life." In the practice of conservation, we will always tend to protect the species that are more likely to empathize with everyone.
But there is also a lot of obscure "death" happening in the biosphere. And when we complete a work of art with the help of the "kill switch," countless lives die for aesthetic reasons, and this action is only "Unintentional Intentionality" in the Kantian sense. In the process of modern humans using our abilities to transform the world, how many lives and species have not died out of "Unintentional"?
We want to give a perceptible perspective when thinking about conservation. If the death of microbes can make us empathize, samely, can we pay more attention to the survival of more species?
So we used synthetic biology to create art and asked the question that "Why do Artists Kill?" Why do we kill？ Why do human beings kill？ And such a kill always manifests itself in an "unintentional" way.
project Design
Plan A:
Death from UV pollution
We designed to use UV-inducible switch, which is sulAp promoter (BBa_K518010) proposed by iGEM11_UT-Tokyo (2011), to turn on the expression of lethal gene.
After full exposure of sunlight, bacteria can synthesize toxins and die. And the lethal gene we chose is the relE toxin (BBa_K185047). The expression of the relE gene has been shown to severely inhibit translation and prevent colony formation [1].
After continuous design and debugging, we built the following gene circuit and successfully tested it through experiment. SulAp promoter activates the expression of downstream genes. The hrpR gene (BBa_K4226001) codes for hrpR protein.
hrpR protein binds to hrpS (BBa_K4226002) protein forming a complex, and the promoter hrpL (BBa_K4226003) is transcriptionally upregulated by hrpR and hrpS.
The expression of relE toxin was also up-regulated. Besides, the reporting system including 3WJ-Bro (BBa_K4226000) and mScarlet-I (BBa_K3977002) was used to detect RNA and protein synthesis of relE gene.
Plan B:
T4 lysis Device and beta-galactosidase synthesis
We designed a suicide pathway based on T4 lysis Device, a system derived from bacteriophage T4, which has two main components: T4 holin (BBa_K112805) and T4 endolysin (BBa_K112806), that cause the bacteria to rupture and die. We used the arabinose inducible pBad/araC as promoter (BBa_I0500) and inserted the lacZ gene (BBa_I732019) in the T4 lysis Device. The lacZ gene controls the synthesis of β-galactosidase, which can react with X-Gal in blue color.
We present this series of reactions through visual processing in the form of art installation. In the art installation, the liquid after the blue reaction is represented by tears dripping from the reaction container, as if the giant's tears are falling from the sky. This installation reflects the cooperation and combination of synthetic biology and art. We hope that this art installation can bring people more thinking about synthetic biology and life. Today, with the rapid development of technology, the life system we rely on is constantly being changed by human beings. This blue tear, as a warning, slowly drops, reminding us to reflect on the impact of human behavior and activities on the whole system.
