Introduction

Throughout the year, we engaged with the wider community through a number of outreach initiatives. An overview of our team’s human practices and how they helped shape our project is described below.

Public Engagement

To engage with the public about the field of synthetic biology, we decided to reach out to high school students to teach them about the iGEM competition, our project team at the University of Michigan, and our current project.

We visited two high schools - Troy High School and Dakota High School - that several of MSBT’s members previously attended to present our project and explain what synthetic biology is. The students learned about the different skills that students in MSBT gain through scientific research and experimental design, as well as the basics of synthetic biology and our current project.

Two MSBT members - Surya and Amruta - visiting Troy High School in Troy, Michigan and presenting on the goals of our 2022 project

Amogh and George presented our 2022 project at Dakota High School in Macomb, Michigan.

Conversations with Professors

Dr. Kenichi Kuroda: University of Michigan School of Dentistry

Dr. Kuroda gave a wonderful presentation to our group about his research on using antimicrobial peptide-mimetic polymers to combat antimicrobial resistance. Antimicrobial peptides have a short lifetime in vivo, have a high cost of production, and may have low efficacy in vivo. Due to these shortcomings, Dr. Kuroda has focused his work on creating antimicrobial polymers that mimic the amphiphilic, cationic, and low molecular weight characteristics of antimicrobial peptides. We discussed how our mechanism can also work to alleviate the high cost of manufacturing the antimicrobial peptide since the bacteria are cheaply producing the peptides and the encapsulins can selectively target the bacteria of interest. Dr. Kuroda then delivers these polymers using nanoparticles through several different mechanisms to combat the formation of bacterial biofilms in a variety of applications. Another goal of our project is to find other ways to deliver antimicrobial peptides more effectively to bacteria, so understanding the different ways he delivered the polymers using nanoparticles offers other ways that we could potentially deliver our antimicrobial peptides in the future. We had not considered using encapsulin nanoparticles as an on-demand release of our antimicrobial peptides. Overall, we gained a much better understanding of antimicrobial polymers and the ways his group works to alleviate some of the challenges associated with dental biofilms.

We also solicited his feedback on our project. He appreciated our approach to synthesizing AMPs with recombinant gene expression, but cautioned us that AMPs tend to have lower potency against bacteria than traditional antibiotics. This was helpful information to guide our project as it would imply larger quantities of AMP would be needed to overcome this limitation. This informed the direction and consideration of scalability in our project.

Gene Therapy Panel

We co-hosted a zoom panel with the CEO and Founder of American Gene Technologies, Jeff Galvin. Jeff Galvin has rich experience in the field of genetic engineering. He earned his BA degree in economics from Harvard in 1981. He has more than 30 years of business and entrepreneurial experience, including founder or executive positions at a variety of Silicon Valley startups. He later found and funded American Gene Technologies.

During the zoom meeting, Jeff discussed the progress gene therapy has made in recent years. American Gene Technologies is aiding this progress by creating a gene therapy platform to allow other scientists to build on their approach to develop new cures. This example of educational outreach showed us the broad range of genetic engineering and how projects like ours can impact the field.

Mini iGEM

We attended the Canadian + US iGEM Mini Jamboree and gave a preliminary version of our presentation to volunteer judges and other iGEM teams. This was a very helpful endeavor as it allowed us to see where we had holes in our project and presentation. We fielded preliminary questions about our project so we could make the necessary improvements. One of the feedback we received was for modeling to be more specific about what data we were able to predict. We were also told to include more actual data in our presentation. With this feedback, we went back to our raw data and included more specifics in our presentation. We also received positive feedback on our theory. This was a very instrumental and worthwhile practice session, and we now feel confident about our presentation for iGEM in Paris.

On the second day, there were several workshops, such as “A general theme: Let’s talk about ___,” where we discussed genetically modified organisms. After this presentation, we talked about our thoughts about genetically modified organisms. This was a very interesting discussion where we were able to learn about many different perspectives on the implications of biotechnology in food and beyond. This type of conversation is very important to participate in, as we should be cautious of the impacts of our scientific discoveries and success.

VIT Joint Youtube Playlist

As part of our partnership with VIT, both teams jointly created interview questions to ask experts on the subject of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a topic relevant to both our teams. We then began the process of interviewing experts to create a joint YouTube playlist. We discussed how the researchers became interested in AMR, what innovative work they do to fight AMR, current research being done in the field, as well as what the general public should know in order to reduce their contribution to AMR. These questions are important to both our projects, and provide critical information about the relevant applications of both projects to inform future experimental questions. For example, one concern about increasing AMR is when a patient fails to complete their full prescription of antibiotics so that the remaining alive bacteria become resistant to the antibiotic and mutate. A future study that is inspired by this problem would be to expose bacteria to an antimicrobial peptide (AMP) to which they are susceptible, but not to kill all of the bacteria in culture. Then, analyze if an encapsulin could improve the cytotoxicity of the AMP in the remaining bacteria which have been exposed to the AMP in culture.