Team:NortheasternU-Boston/Engagement
Education and Public Engagement
Genetic Engineering for Kids with NEPTUN
The Northeastern Program for Teaching by Undergraduates, NEPTUN, is a student organization at Northeastern which hosts a free event for local area high-school students to come to Northeastern’s campus and take a day of fun and educational classes put together by undergraduate students at Northeastern University.
Our team had the pleasure of putting together a simple introduction to the fields of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. The two, hour-long courses consisted of a primer pre-quiz by show of hands to gauge prior knowledge and get the students interested followed by a brief historical and conceptual background on the field. The courses ended with a view of modern synthetic biology including a short interactive benchling demonstration, a very brief discussion of some ethical issues in biology, and a few cool cutting edge things happening in the field like CRISPR/Cas. The course was a rousing success and hearing the students excitedly chatter about the future implications of genetic engineering and synthetic biology was inspiring. Feel free to peruse the slide deck we used during the course below!
Bringing Research to the Experts
As a part of our education initiative, we collected information on a set of current biotechnologies to help inform the experts we spoke to in Mozambique. By sharing information about the state of inexpensive and effective biotechnology we hoped to inspire conversations amongst experts with agency to have a significant health impact in Mozambique. We also provided contact information with the experts, to facilitate their outreach to the researchers and the initiations of collaborations. The response from the experts that we shared this information with was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and inspired Keba Jobarteh to say that “a point of care test that gives viral load range for HIV is the holy grail.”
These resources are collected and shown below:
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Paper that describes the application of paper-based biosensors to detection of Zika virus:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867416305050 -
CRISPR/Cas9-based nucleotide detection system for detecting and monitoring disease:
http://collinslab.mit.edu/files/science_zhang.pdf -
Paper-based centrifuges that can be used for blood tests, including isolating and detecting malaria parasite:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-016-0009 -
Published paper outlining background, mechanism, and applicability of toe-hold switches and paper-based systems:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867414012914?via%3Dihub -
Paper-based bacterial detection:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac100231a -
Review article describing current state and problems with advancing synthetic biology:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrm3767
