BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit
Name
eaat5105.full.pdf
Size
2.02 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
4c1b1c9db43d060587ee6178beae9ffb
Author(s)
Nguyen, Peter Q.
Stark, Jessica C.
Donghia, Nina
Ferrante, Tom
Hsu, Karen J.
Dubner, Rachel S.
Pardee, Keith
Jewett, Michael C.
Huang, Ally
Takahashi, Melissa Kimie
Date Issued
August 2018
Journal
Science Advances
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Huang, Ally et al. “BioBits™ Explorer: A Modular Synthetic Biology Education Kit.” Science Advances 4, 8 (August 2018): eaat5105
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Hands-on demonstrations greatly enhance the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) concepts and foster engagement and exploration in the sciences. While numerous chemistry and physics classroom demonstrations exist, few biology demonstrations are practical and accessible due to the challenges and concerns of growing living cells in classrooms. We introduce BioBits™ Explorer, a synthetic biology educational kit based on shelf-stable, freeze-dried, cell-free (FD-CF) reactions, which are activated by simply adding water. The FD-CF reactions engage the senses of sight, smell, and touch with outputs that produce fluorescence, fragrances, and hydrogels, respectively. We introduce components that can teach tunable protein expression, enzymatic reactions, biomaterial formation, and biosensors using RNA switches, some of which represent original FD-CF outputs that expand the toolbox of cell-free synthetic biology. The BioBits™ Explorer kit enables hands-on demonstrations of cutting-edge science that are inexpensive and easy to use, circumventing many current barriers for implementing exploratory biology experiments in classrooms.
MIT Department
Institute for Medical Engineering and Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aat5105
