Difference between revisions of "Team:UNIFI/HP/Gold Integrated"

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<h2 style="font-size: 3vw; margin-left: 13.5vw; padding: 1.5vw;">Perception of SynBio</h2>  
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<h2 style="font-size: 3vw; margin-left: 13.5vw; padding: 1.5vw;">Music, not just sounds</h2>  
  
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<p style=" font-size: 18px; margin-left: 15vw; margin-right: 15vw;">
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<p style=" font-size: 18px; margin-left: 15vw; margin-right: 15vw;">Since our project pertain to the interdisciplinary field of science-art, to accomplish our goals we needed not only skills in biology and informatic fields, but also in art, music in particular. In order to improve our knowledge on the latter subject, we enrolled as consultant the musician and student of architecture Samuele del Panta, multi-instrumentalist musician and singer. We preferred a student than a professional musician to express the importance of “fresh minds with fresh ideas” and we think iGEM is the perfect frame to test the capabilities of young promising minds.<br>
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Although some say art is an end in itself, science-art might surely have a variety of goals, for example sensitizing the public to current scientific debates or gifting the public with a different perspective on scientific world. We decided to ask this and other questions to more than two hundred high school and university students and the outcome was very impressive! Many people agreed with the fact science-art mission is to bring the public nearer to science and that such goal is at least sufficiently achieved (88,37% of positive answers). Other goals can be achieved though, as someone suggested, and science is still far from being as known as we think it should be; someone suggested science-art could simply be useful in making people have fun while getting in touch with science, others thought it could instead give a more personal and subjective cut to a field usually seen as absolutely rational and objective. <br>
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Samuele worked with us during the may of October to establish a ratio with which our software should translate lights to music and his skills and knowledges in musical composition have been crucial for the development of an efficient system to obtain the final informatic pattern for translation; we are all sure the resulting melody will be a pleasure for everyone’s ears!
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Many students, 88,78%, stated that they think it is useful to invest resources on science-art, but when it comes to decide which biological processes and techniques should be taken in account, we noticed a change in subject’s opinions; in fact while only 15% of the interviewed declared themselves as absolutely opposed to the usage of any kind of organism in science-art, a quarter declared they would be against science-art made with superior organisms (e.g fishes, plants, mammals etc..); even more interesting is the direct correlation between the number of those who answered negatively to the usage of animals and organisms in science-art and the number of those who wouldn’t take advantage of any organisms neither for scientific purpose (10% of the interviewed wouldn’t use microorganisms, 22% wouldn’t use superior organisms for scientific research).
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As a student of architecture, he did not have the slightest idea on how genetical engineering works, so in the beginning we took the right time to explain him what is iGEM and how we were going to produce patterns of fluorescence with bacteria because it was very important to give him a general idea on our project. Afterwards he explained us, in an interesting exchange of knowledge, the basis of musical notes, scales and the common praxis for composition. Therefore we could finally start to think about <a target="_blank" href="https://2017.igem.org/Team:UNIFI/Theoretical_basis#mus">how to convert</a> light to tones and how to achieve something that can be defined melody, and not just “a bunch of sounds, one next to the other”, as he stated.
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Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, there is a clear similarity in the percentage of those who think science-art is useless or is failing its goals and of those who wouldn’t support a scientific progress gained through animal usage. This latter query brings us to another central question: have we, thanks to our project, succeeded in getting in touch with the most important public of high school students, or in other words, next generation of potential scientists? We directly asked them what were they thinking of our project and our outreach activities and we got a 92% score of appreciation, even though we must consider that statistically when people are asked to give an evaluation to a work done by those that are asking, they tend to give more positive feedback.<br></p>
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<h2 style="font-size: 3vw; margin-left: 13.5vw; padding: 1.5vw;">The “ear” of an expert</h2>
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<p style=" font-size: 18px; margin-left: 15vw; margin-right: 15vw;">During the Skype conference with Prof. David S. Kong from Boston, we asked him which could be possible applications of our project, from the moment that he has worked recently on science-art. We were curious to know more on his “<a target="_blank" https://gizmodo.com/scientists-made-music-from-the-human-microbiome-and-it-1798537905">Biota Beats</a>” and its applications and in response he taught us the important lesson that science art could serve as mean to approach public and try to focus audience attention on the aspects we want to divulge.<br>
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Answering to our various questions, he suggested that a possible application of our light-to-sound converter could be the opening of scientific world to blind people; from the moment that usually blind people have an augmented sense of hearing, they could easily detect changes in notes produced converting any kind of fluorescence linked to the expression of a gene or a metabolic pathway. We tried to contact the Blind Association based in Florence and Prato (namely, UICFirenze and UICPrato) but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to start an initiative with them due to bureaucratic issues and consequent elongation of days required for the approval of the plan.<br>
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Nonetheless it is still a valuable advice, the one given us by Prof. Kong and could be explored in the future!
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</p>
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<h2 style="font-size: 3vw; margin-left: 13.5vw; padding: 1.5vw;">Let Coli entertain you!</h2>
  
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<h2 style="font-size: 3vw; margin-left: 13.5vw; padding: 1.5vw;">Music, not just sounds</h2>
 
 
<p style=" font-size: 18px; margin-left: 15vw; margin-right: 15vw;">
 
<p style=" font-size: 18px; margin-left: 15vw; margin-right: 15vw;">
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Since our project pertain to the interdisciplinary field of science-art, to accomplish our goals we needed not only skills in biology and informatic fields, but also in art, music in particular. We had the opportunity to ask students what they would like our “coli music” to sound like and more than 50% of them replied they would like something aimed at reproducing notes with a ratio and not totally casual. We tried to accomplish this task by enrolling as consultant the musician and student of architecture Samuele del Panta, multi-instrumentalist musician and singer. We preferred a student than a professional musician to express the importance of “fresh minds with fresh ideas” and iGEM is the perfect frame to test the capabilities of young promising minds.<br>
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We had the opportunity to ask students what they would like our “coli music” to sound like and more than 50% of them replied they would like something aimed at reproducing notes in a sort of “random” pattern, or in other words, with the least human contribution possible. Furthermore, we received a similar advice by Prof. Dirk Stemerding, who said that would be much more impressive and surprising to obtain a music that would be the direct expression of bacteria’s metabolism.<br>
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Samuele worked with us during the may of October to establish a ratio with which our software should translate lights to music and his skills and knowledge in musical composition have been crucial for the development of an efficient system to obtain the final informatic pattern for translation; we are all sure the resulting melody will be a pleasure for everyone’s ears! </p>
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Having said that, we thought about how we could make it evident that the translational system is made to interfere the least possible with the pathway expressed by the strains of Escherchia coli and we came up with the idea of programming various experiments in which we changed time after time many variables in the growth medium; for example we used different concentrations of substrates like IPTG to differentiate the expression of a strain from the other, or we used different proportions of the two strains mixed together.<br>
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The results were a great number of different patterns of emission that in the end will represent the various sheets “composed” by bacteria!</p>
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Revision as of 20:56, 31 October 2017

Human Practices Gold

Music, not just sounds

Since our project pertain to the interdisciplinary field of science-art, to accomplish our goals we needed not only skills in biology and informatic fields, but also in art, music in particular. In order to improve our knowledge on the latter subject, we enrolled as consultant the musician and student of architecture Samuele del Panta, multi-instrumentalist musician and singer. We preferred a student than a professional musician to express the importance of “fresh minds with fresh ideas” and we think iGEM is the perfect frame to test the capabilities of young promising minds.
Samuele worked with us during the may of October to establish a ratio with which our software should translate lights to music and his skills and knowledges in musical composition have been crucial for the development of an efficient system to obtain the final informatic pattern for translation; we are all sure the resulting melody will be a pleasure for everyone’s ears! As a student of architecture, he did not have the slightest idea on how genetical engineering works, so in the beginning we took the right time to explain him what is iGEM and how we were going to produce patterns of fluorescence with bacteria because it was very important to give him a general idea on our project. Afterwards he explained us, in an interesting exchange of knowledge, the basis of musical notes, scales and the common praxis for composition. Therefore we could finally start to think about how to convert light to tones and how to achieve something that can be defined melody, and not just “a bunch of sounds, one next to the other”, as he stated.

The “ear” of an expert

During the Skype conference with Prof. David S. Kong from Boston, we asked him which could be possible applications of our project, from the moment that he has worked recently on science-art. We were curious to know more on his “Biota Beats” and its applications and in response he taught us the important lesson that science art could serve as mean to approach public and try to focus audience attention on the aspects we want to divulge.
Answering to our various questions, he suggested that a possible application of our light-to-sound converter could be the opening of scientific world to blind people; from the moment that usually blind people have an augmented sense of hearing, they could easily detect changes in notes produced converting any kind of fluorescence linked to the expression of a gene or a metabolic pathway. We tried to contact the Blind Association based in Florence and Prato (namely, UICFirenze and UICPrato) but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to start an initiative with them due to bureaucratic issues and consequent elongation of days required for the approval of the plan.
Nonetheless it is still a valuable advice, the one given us by Prof. Kong and could be explored in the future!

Let Coli entertain you!

We had the opportunity to ask students what they would like our “coli music” to sound like and more than 50% of them replied they would like something aimed at reproducing notes in a sort of “random” pattern, or in other words, with the least human contribution possible. Furthermore, we received a similar advice by Prof. Dirk Stemerding, who said that would be much more impressive and surprising to obtain a music that would be the direct expression of bacteria’s metabolism.
Having said that, we thought about how we could make it evident that the translational system is made to interfere the least possible with the pathway expressed by the strains of Escherchia coli and we came up with the idea of programming various experiments in which we changed time after time many variables in the growth medium; for example we used different concentrations of substrates like IPTG to differentiate the expression of a strain from the other, or we used different proportions of the two strains mixed together.
The results were a great number of different patterns of emission that in the end will represent the various sheets “composed” by bacteria!

Team Unifi

unifi.igem@gmail.com