CH391L/S12/FinalProjectRubric

Final Project

• Background and Motivation
  • Describe the big picture technological, scientific, or societal impact of your project.
  • State of the art: What has been done to tackle this problem before?
  • Where did the biological parts you are using come from?
  • How have these parts been used before in synthetic biology?
• Methods
  • Exactly how will you get the required genes, strains, and plasmids?
  • What DNA sequences will you construct? How will you construct them? Be specific down to the level of creating a flowchart describing the oligonucleotide sequences, PCR reactions, cloning reactions, etc., you would use.
  • How will you test your constructs? What are the expected results?
  • How can you troubleshoot failed experiments? Are there alternative approaches to the same final goal?

Your group will be given an opportunity to respond to comments and revise the written part of the project after the final presentation.

Group effort (200 pts)

Individual effort (100 pts)

Total (300 pts)

Describing your project's DNA sequences

For your project, you are required to create two representations of your synthetic biology constructs.

First, you need a high-level flowchart/circuit diagram. I recommend using TinkerCell to create this image. Label standardized parts from the iGEM registry with their numbers. Indicate the sources of non-registry DNA sequences.

• TinkerCell CAD system
• Synthetic Biology Open Language

Example of a circuit drawn using TinkerCell

Second, you need a file showing the full DNA sequence of the construct. For creating the sequence file, I recommend using one of these software programs:

• ApE - A plasmid Editor (shareware)
• Geneious - commercial (free version does not allow editing)