Building the SynBio community in the Czech Republic from the bottom up: You get what you give

Abstract

Given its highly innovative character and potential socioeconomic impact, Synthetic Biology is often ranked among prominent research areas and national research priorities in developed countries. The global evolution of this field is proceeding by leaps and bounds but its development at the level of individual states varies widely. Despite their current satisfactory economic status, the majority of 13, mostly post-communist, countries that entered the European Union family in and after 2004 (EU13) have long overlooked the blossoming of Synthetic Biology. Their prioritized lines of research have been directed elsewhere or "Synthetic Biology" did not become a widely accepted term to encompass their bioengineering and biotechnology domains. The Czech Republic is not an exception. The local SynBio mycelium already exists but is mainly built bottom-up through the activities of several academic labs, iGEM teams, and spin-off companies. In this article, we tell their individual stories and summarize the prerequisites that allowed their emergence in the Czech academic and business environment. In addition, we provide the reader with a brief overview of laboratories, research hubs, and companies that perform biotechnology and bioengineering-oriented research and that may be included in a notional "shadow SynBio community" but have not yet adopted Synthetic Biology as a unifying term for their ventures. We also map the current hindrances for a broader expansion of Synthetic Biology in the Czech Republic and suggest possible steps that should lead to the maturity of this fascinating research field in our country.

Keywords: Biotechnology and bioengineering; Community; Czech Republic; EU13 countries; Public perception; Research landscape; Synthetic biology; iGEM.

Fig. 1

Geographical distribution of the major Czech public universities with life-science or technology study programs (A), academic and business units forming the “core” Czech SynBio community (B), and wider Czech academic and business bioengineering-oriented “shadow” SynBio community (C). Note that the figure does not capture complete Czech biotechnology and bioengineering sector. Abbreviations: Algatech, Center for Algal Biotechnology; CRH, Centre of the Region Haná for Biotechnological and Agricultural Research; BIOCEV, Biotechnology and Biomedicine Center of the Academy of Sciences and Charles University; IOCB, Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Nanorobots, The Nanorobots Research Center; CEITEC, Central European Institute of Technology; FNUSA-ICRC, The International Clinical Research Center of St Anne's University Hospital in Brno.

Fig. 2

Graphical representation of the Cyanotrap project of Brno iGEM team 2020. The “trap” mentioned in the project name is a device that would float on water, filter out large particles and feed the water with cyanobacteria into a chamber containing engineered Bacillus subtilis anchored on cellulose beads. B. subtilis was designed to display various proteins on its surface using the interaction of the LysM module with its cell wall. The CBM (carbohydrate binding module) serves to immobilize the cells on cellulose, microvirin and lysozyme anchored to Strain L catches the cyanobacterial cells and disrupts their envelopes, respectively. The MlrA, MlrB, and MlrC enzymes anchored to Strain D degrade microcystin, a toxin released from the lysed cyanobacteria. All modules are either directly fused to synthetic protein scaffolds or attached to them through a strong, non-covalent interaction of cohesin-dockerin modules.

Fig. 3

Sampling Human's Diagnostics On Target working principle. Diagnostics On Target (DOT) assays contain dried yeast genetically engineered to perform tasks normally executed by complex instruments. The engineered cells bind to cells in a sample and evaluate their immuno profiles. If a cell matches the targeted profile, the engineered yeast cells exit their dormant state and enter an activated state wherein they produce easily measurable reporter signals. The method is highly modular. By mixing and matching the types of engineered cells the user can modify the target profile using basic logic gates. For instance, a two-input “AND” gate profile requires two specific antigens to both be present on the bound cell to trigger a positive readout. The adaptability of the DOT platform allows for the analysis of anything from rare epithelial cells in samples of lysed blood to apoptotic T-cells in primary cell cultures.

Fig. 4

Selected outcomes of the public opinion poll on the topic of GMOs by The Public Opinion Research Centre (Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, modified).

Fig. 5

Design, build, test, and learn when forming a local SynBio community.