Dummies Guide to cool Synthetic Biology projects

Dummies Guide to cool Synthetic Biology projects

This guide is analogous to ‘Learn to Programming’ guides for computer languages. It is meant for complete lay person to jump into making their own biological systems.

The basic outline of this tutorial is as follows:

• Learn the basics of molecular biology [LINK]

• Visit Standard Biology Parts website [Link] and past iGEM teams’ websites [LINK] to get a feel of the things you are going to make and what you are going to use.

• Brainstorm for ideas or better still, steal one (from past iGEM project ideas). [LINK to ideas]. Analogous to the famous ‘Hello World!’ program, we are going to solve a simple problem here, which is making an XOR gate.

• Broadly identify the components you are going to need and the way they are going to be connected to each other.

• Make a plan and diagram of the logical network for your project. In our case, since we are going to use AND and NOT gates for making XOR gate, we have made the following diagram: [PROVIDE A DIAGRAM HERE]

• Do mathematical modeling of your logical/biochemical network and identify the bottlenecks and changes to be made.

• Identify biological parts which you are going to need from Standard Biology Parts website

• Design an assembly plan for it

• Do the wet work!

• Lo, you have a cool project.

TODO:

• Give more examples
• Supplement it with a real project (XOR or some other)
• Expand it and develop it further