That's Bananas Podcast
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Our podcast, That’s Bananas!aims to engage the public through yet another pathway. Our audience consists of those who have an interest in science and would like to learn more. We hope to reach out to those who may not have the chance to learn about synthetic biology or biotechnology, and teach them how these new advances have impacted our lives and how they could impact us in the future. Our podcast not only documents our journey and process as an iGEM 2022 team, but it also provides helpful guidelines, tips, and advice for future iGEM teams. In our episodes, we provide an introduction to the iGEM competition, synthetic biology, and biotechnology; diving into conversations involving our personal opinion, real world data, reliable sources and personal experiences; we discussed topics related to ethics and morals of synthetic biology, new advancements in the scientific community, and our own struggles and success along the way. The podcast also acts as a means of spreading awareness of our own project, which targets the banana crisis, informing our audience of the severity of the issue and how we plan to tackle it.
Episode 1
In episode 1, our hosts, along with our instructor, gave a brief introduction to the goals and purposes of our podcast. In more details, we covered what the iGEM competition is, and related synthetic biology to everyday life. Building upon the mention of synthetic biology, we noted several recent advances in the field, including cloning, CRISPR-Cas9, and gene manipulation in humans. We hope with this episode, we could attract our audience towards synthetic biology, whether it be finding synthetic biology interesting or even directing their path toward such studies.
Episode 2
In our second episode, we invited our project lead, Ryan, to introduce the topic of our project, our solution, our goals, and some past achievements. We started off by introducing our project topic: fusarium wilt and the Panama disease, and covered its impact towards different aspects such as economic, environmental, and even political, discovering its significance towards the banana industry. Later we moved on to the structure of our teams, and what responsibility each team holds. We also updated our current progress with the project, and the major events and collaboration we were doing. The Jamboree in October was also another thing we mentioned, how big of an event it is, and what we plan on doing.
Since we’ve already introduced iGEM in our previous episode, we hope to dive even further with those who are interested in joining future iGEM teams, as we shared our own experience in participating in this competition.
Episode 3
In our third episode, we discussed the ethics and morals of synthetic biology and technology. This included diving into specific cases and examples related to genetic modified organisms, CRISPR-Cas9, and biotechnology. Examples include Elon Musks’s Neuralink, He Jiankui’s CRISPR babies, and Oxitec’s research on Aedes aegypti. We hoped to get more people interested in synthetic biology by sharing how these technologies can directly impact our lives. We also discussed the ethics and morals of the case studies mentioned above while including our own thoughts and opinions. By talking about these ethical and moral concerns, we hope to get more people to start thinking about these new developments and how they could affect our lives.
Episode 4
In this episode, we invited George Lee, a Taiwanese cook who uses plant-based foods to recreate Taiwanese dishes on his food page called Chez Jorge. We discussed about topics related to food sustainability, its effects on the environment, and meat alternative technology. Through our discussion, we learned about ways plant-based foods can be manipulated to taste similar to that of meat, its difference compared to lab-grown meat, and real meat. Our vision for this episode is to educate the public about the problems of meat consumption and how alternative meat technology or plant-based food options may be a better option.
Parts Contribution
Our parts collection (BBa_K4137000~BBa_K4137015) is fully annotated with sequence features, is easily navigable between composite part and basic part alike, and documents our cloning and protein expression experiences with the parts. We chose to document all sequences in the forward directionality despite the reverse directionality of some of our constructs (BBa_K4137002, BBa_K4137003, BBa_K4137009) to minimize the confusion that we experienced when cross referencing between team wiki and parts registry - we thus hope to help make the utilization of our parts as intuitive as possible, so as to save future iGEM teams the time required to research obscure sequences from GenBank. In particular, we hope that BBa_K4137002(mleR) and BBa_K4137005(pmleS) will expand the diversity of transcriptional regulators and their respective effectors available to future iGEM teams for design brainstorming.
To see our parts collection, visit the Parts page.
Thermolysis Protocol
Because our own experiences in the lab have been riddled with equipment limitations, we wanted to contribute the preliminary fruits of our resourcefulness by providing future iGEM teams with the thermolysis protein extraction protocol we created. This protocol only calls for sample buffers, PBS(Phosphate Buffered Saline), eppendorf cap locks, and a dry bath, and is thus far simpler to prepare from scratch compared to sonication and chemical lysis. Though this method may not be applicable if teams wish to perform downstream protein purification, we believe that this protocol will help teams with less lab equipment to have a tool with which to validate basic protein expression.
To see the protocol, visit the Notebook page.