Team:Bielefeld-Germany/StreetScience

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SynBioDay: Street Science in Bielefeld

On 28th of June all german iGEM teams were invited to the strategy process „Biotechnologie 2020+“. In Berlin we decided to plan and arrange a common day in all german cities with participating iGEM teams. In the end the SynBioDay took place in Munich (TU and LMU), in Darmstadt, Göttingen, Marburg, Tübingen, Bonn and of course in Bielefeld. To raise public awareness we all agreed to organize the event on 25th of august. The idea behind our common day was to inform public not only about Snythetic Biology, but also about iGEM and our project. We also wanted to show that there are plenty of iGEM teams with great ideas, that's why as part of our collaboration with the iGEM team from the Southern University of Denmark we invited them to present a poster at our booth and to help us with the realization. In Germany there is an ongoing debate about modern life sciences, especially biotechnology, genetic engineering and synthetic biology and we thought that by informing and explaining we might lower the prejudices (for the german debate about Synthetic Biology see here our discussion with René Röspel, a member of the german parliament).



The poster of our project, we presented at Street Science.
Our poster to illustrate the development of biology to Synthetic Biology.
The poster of the iGEM team SDU-Denmark, which our denish guests presented at Street Science.

In Bielefeld we organized the booth in cooperation with Bielefeld Marketing.

  • a microscope to have a look on microorganisms and “wanted poster” for the organisms
  • pipettes and lab coats for kids to feel like scientist
  • colored water for the kids to pipet and merge
  • posters for everyone to understand our project and our approach
  • an experiment for DNA extraction
  • a video about Synthetic Biology (taken from TechNyou). Credits to the iGEM Team from Bonn for translating, thank you. Click here to watch the video in german.
  • Kevin also made a short video about plenty of different microorganisms, showing impressive electromicroscopic pictures (pictures were taken from wikipedia and from working groups of our university.


Script for DNA-Extraction
  • 1. Mix a tea spoon of salt and 3 – 4 big drops of dishwashing detergent (or a squirt) in a BlueCap (50 mL) and add water up to 50 mL. Close the BlueCap and agitate till everything is solubilized.
  • 2. Cut an apricot, a tomate or a banana into half, break a half into small pieces and mix them with your Detergent-Salt-Solution
  • 3. Let the mixture sit for 5 minutes
  • 4. Use a blender to crush your fruit pieces (be careful, only blend for a short time, < 5 sec)
  • 5. Use a coffeefilter to separate the fluid and the solid
  • 6. Transfer a part of your fluid into a test tube and pour ice-cold ethanol down the inside of the tube, use the same volume fluid and ethanol
  • 7. DNA-strands precipitate in the upper phase (this can take up to 5 minutes). You can fish your DNA with a wooden toothpick, if you want to.
  • 8. Place the DNA in a reaction tube, add ethanol and glue the cap
  • 9. Kids now can take home the fruit DNA they extracted

Comments:

  • Don't let kids handle fierce knives
  • Kids are not allowed to use the ethanol, that's a job for the advisers



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