The "SynBioNova" Project

The Novara’s Synthetic Biology Project (SynBioNova) is a program dedicated to the education and advancement of synthetic biology, and the development of an open and collaborative community between students at the Università del Piemonte Orientale (UPO).

SynBioNova’s main program is the Bachelor’s in Biotechnology’s Thesis (BBT) project. The BBT program gives to the students in Biotechnology the opportunity to push the boundaries of synthetic biology by tackling everyday issues facing the world. BBT students will organize themselves into multidisciplinary teams and, under the supervision of a thesis’s advisor, will work together to design, build, test, and measure a system of their own design using interchangeable biological parts and standard molecular biology techniques. This can be accomplished with a set of biological parts, that will be progressively collected and made available by a Registry of Standard Biological Parts (RSBP) curated by the Laboratory of Applied Biology at UPO. Parts designed and submitted to the Registry follow the Golden Gate cloning strategy as described in Figure 1 and in refs. [1, 2]. This system is based on the ability of type IIS restriction enzymes to assemble multiple DNA fragments in a defined linear order in only three successive cloning steps. This modular cloning (MoClo) system can be readily automated and will be extremely useful for applications such as gene stacking and metabolic engineering.

The first two aims of SynBioNova will be:

1) To introduce students participating to the BBT program to the field of Synthetic Biology. This will be achieved by organizing an optional course in Synthetic Biology (second semester, accessible to II/III years students). During the course the students will learn the basics on the strategies to design and assemble complex DNA molecules encoding multiple genetic elements in various predefined arrangements, including the Golden Gate, BioBrick and Gibson Assembly cloning strategies;

2) To start collecting the biological parts and organize the Registry. This will be achieved with the help of all scientific departments at UPO (the School of Medicine and the Departments of Pharmacy and Science) that will contribute the biological material that will be used to construct the modular parts. Special interest will be addressed to the construction of libraries of the following elements:

- The human gut/skin microbiome and its associated phageome (promoters, regulatory elements including sRNA, protein-coding genes, etc.)

- The human “self- antigenome” (a collection of self-antigens associated to autoimmune diseases or cancer)

- Biomimetic/bioactive peptides (adhesion molecules, cytokines, bacteriocins, etc)

[1] C. Engler, R. Kandzia, S. Marillonnet, A one pot, one step, precision cloning method with high throughput capability, PLoS One, 3 (2008) e3647.

[2] E. Weber, C. Engler, R. Gruetzner, S. Werner, S. Marillonnet, A modular cloning system for standardized assembly of multigene constructs, PLoS One, 6 (2011) e16765.