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Team:Ehime-Japan/HumanPractice-E.create
From 2012.igem.org
・E.create!
Our motivation
We made a BioBrick card game “E.create” to introduce to a number of people the enjoyability of synthetic biology. Nobody in our team had learned synthetic biology until we started our iGEM project. We thought from our experiences that the construction of the plasmids is the most interesting process. We hope that everybody who is interested in life sciences and genetic engineering can enjoy learning synthetic biology by playing with E.create!
E.create is a puzzle game. The kit contains cards with illustrations on them. Each card corresponds to one of the gene parts including:
・Promoter,
・RBS (Ribosome Binding Site),
・Protein coding regions,
・Terminator,
・Ori (Origin), and
・Drug registance genes (KmR, CmR and AmpR).
☆ How to play
Players will challenge to constract one or more plasmid(s) that should be required to transform ''E.coli'' to give properties presented by the puzzle master. An example is shown below. Let’s make it!
Ex. This ''E.coli'' can express GFP constitutively and has Km resistance.
E.colevel.0 Doya
・He always makes GFP.
・He has Km resistance.
You can choose the proper cards from the bottom and try to build the plasmid expressing GFP in E.coli!
※Turn the cards you do not use face-down and put a card of resistances on the center.
Finish !
One of the answers is this !
Did you enjoy it? If you play more, let's challenge to make the E.colis !
E.colevel.1 Ao
・He always makes CFP.
・He has Cm resistance.
E.colevel.2 Hana chan
・She always makes toxic to E.coli.
・She makes RFP when toxic is produced.
・She has Amp resistance.
E.colevel.3 Postman X
In addition, we did presentation about sythetic biology for high school students and enjoyed playing them with
E.create on the Open Campus days of University (August 7 and 8) !
On the other day, a few members of our team visited a high school to do educational activity and play E.create together. We taught about 50 students who are learning biology. Thank to everyone!
Evaluation of our activities above.
We asked the participants in our educational activities the following questions.
1.Before our lecture and playing E.create
2. After our lecture and playing E.create
The answers toward those questions told us that our educational activities were greatly successful !!!
Questions about gene recombination__
Q1. Do you know gene recombination?
Q2. How do you feel toward gene recombination?
Q3. Did you change your idea to Q1?
Q4. Did you change your idea to Q2?
Q5. Did you change your interest in gene recombination by comparison with before the lecture and playing E.create?
Answers to the questions
Answers to Q1 and Q3, Q2 and Q4, and Q5 are shown below.
Also, we have a plan to distribute E.create around Japan in order to help studying synthetic biology.
In Japan, the standards for the contents of high-school biology courses are changing.
From the next year, high school students will study more about molecular biology and genetic engineering
than before. If the students read the text only, it is difficult to imagine how genetic engineering
works. So we hope that E.create will help them understand it more effectively and deeply.
