Human Practices were an essential component in the development of our project.The work that we accomplished this year varied in many aspects.We conducted many sessions on how synthetic biology could change our view of life and science, especially among school children and college students. We had an active interaction with the community in order to educate the public about synthetic biology and the ethical issues in synthetic biology.
We have also ventured into policy-making by creating a GMM legislation proposal to help advance the laws and regulations of GMMs around the world.
Apart from this, we took our knowledge to the grassroots by conducting educational programs in the Hindi language to teach younger generations in rural areas about science, engineering, and biology.
Safety and security risks were also assessed by us. We actively considered how our project will affect our environment and the public perception by conducting surveys and interactions.
Being a more of a foundational advancement project in the field of synthetic biology the impact over the society was not very straightforward, however, it was more concerned with the present-day research development in multiple disciplines.We therefore integrated human practice considerations into the design and execution of our project by interacting with professors and researchers from multiple disciplines that how our project poses to be an integral element in genetic networks intended to solve scientific challenges for years to come, to better understand their needs and use these findings to influence our team decisions.
Dr. Shaunak Sen is a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at our Institute, specialising in Control Theory. When we started brainstorming over our project, we reached out to him for advice about square wave oscillators that we were planning to design. It was he who suggested to us the idea of using an oscillator feeding into a toggle switch in order to generate Square Waves. He further introduced to us the work Dr. Richard M Murray had done on oscillators with ring topologies. He also told us about trying out relaxation oscillators in order to generate a better Square wave response.
Dr. James Gomes is a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, IIT Delhi. His research mainly revolves around the field of Systems Biology. Once we had decided the topology for our project, we discussed with him at length about possible improvements and also got a lot of help from him in our Square wave Modelling. However, he wasn’t very convinced by our topology and rather suggested to us to use 'build up and fire' kind of oscillators for better generation of Square Waves.
Dr. Perumal is a Molecular Biologist at the School of Biological Sciences, IIT Delhi.
Our talk with him was indeed very helpful to us in the execution of our project. It was he who suggested to us the strain Streptomyces griseus (Orf2) whose biosafety facilities were available at our lab.
Mr. Mahendra Sahare, is a PhD scholar at the Department of Humanities doing a project under a Supreme Court lawyer, Dr. Naveen Thayyil. He has been in collaboration with iGEM IIT Delhi for the past two years. Together, we have worked on the aspect of ‘Ethical Scientific Practices’. Also, on his recent visit to IISER Mohali, he came back with a collaborative offer for iGEM IIT Delhi to mentor IISER Mohali and help in the establishment of an iGEM team there. On our return from the Giant Jamboree 2016, our team members gave a presentation there, and thereafter our team mentored the iGEM Mohali team.
We also talked to many researchers pursuing their Ph.D here at IIT Delhi, to get to know about various possible uses of Biological Oscillators, before we started our project.
Here are their views on how Biological Oscillators can be used in various applications.
Mr. Venkat is a researcher in the field of Systems Biology. In our discussion with him, he told us that Biological Oscillators can be used as a clock reference analogous to those in electrical engineering used for signal processing, particularly as a bridge between networks for synchronisation and as a "modem" carrying information.
A researcher by profession, he works in the field of synchronisation of non-linear and linear oscillators. His guidance over the subject of Biological Oscillators allowed us to use gene regulatory networks in circuits similar to the repressilator.
He is a researcher in the field of convergent systems. He told us about how Biological oscillators can have several applications in his field of research. According to him, if the oscillator is tuned to be convergent, then many interesting phenomena like time-scales and synchronisation can be analysed better.
