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The overall goal of synthetic biology is the application of engineering principles to design or redesign a variety of biological components and/or systems that serve useful purposes and do not currently exist in the natural world. This multidisciplinary field has already had significant impacts in medicine, agriculture, conservation, and green energy among others and has increasingly attracted the attention and interest of undergraduates.  With the exponentially expanding availability of sequence data and functional information from a diverse array of organisms and the growing number of modular, synthetic DNA parts, synthetic biology is increasingly a field that entails a substantial amount of data mining and analysis. Synthetic biology is also a discipline that is amenable to the undergraduate classroom as an effective means of teaching concepts in molecular genetics, cell biology and systems biology and simultaneously introducing students and increasing their comfort level with mining and analysis of big data. Here we will discuss various strategies and approaches at all levels of the curriculum to employ the exciting field of synthetic biology to introduce students to meaningful data mining, analysis, and application to engineering novel biological constructs.

• QUBES_SynBio Poster_2.pptx(PPTX | 705 KB)
• SynBio_Circuit Building Protocol.pdf(PDF | 66 KB)
• SynBio_DNA Digital Data Storage.pdf(PDF | 178 KB)
• SynBio_Promoter Engineering with Big Data.pdf(PDF | 76 KB)
• SynBio_Rebuliding a Minimal Synthetic Cell.pdf(PDF | 73 KB)
• License terms

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Margaret S Saha, Beteel Abu-Ageel, Sanjana Challa, Xiangyi Fang, Chai Hibbert, Anna Isler, Elias Nafziger, Adam Oliver, Hanqiu Peng, Julia Urban, Vivian Zhu (2019). Using Synthetic Biology to Teach Data Science. Evolution of Data in the Classroom: From Data to Data Science (SW 2019), (Version 3.0). QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/B01R-P620

  BibTex | EndNote

1. 2019 QUBES/BioQUEST Summer Workshop
2. 5th Life Discovery Conference
3. Abstract
4. Activity Length
5. Advanced
6. assessment
7. Audience Level
8. bioinformatics
9. Concept inventories
10. concept inventory
11. CourseSource
12. data science
13. Extended Project
14. gene expression
15. gene regulation
16. Homework
17. Instructional Setting
18. introductory
19. Lab
20. Majors
21. microRNAs
22. More than 1 hour
23. natural history
24. natural history collections
25. Online course
26. Poster
27. Reference material
28. synthetic biology
29. Teaching material
30. Undergraduate
31. Workshop material

This version contains an updated poster file and supplemental material.