National Science and Engineering Week exploded in Fife, Scotland with a regional "Science Discovery Day". Team St Andrews worked to convey the fundamental concepts of synthetic biology in new and exciting ways.

We had a number of exhibits, each catering to a different audience:

• For the littlest kids, we ran an interactive "Codon Game", where children could "build a gene" from little paper parts.
• We had interactive visualizations of DNA and Thermus aquaticus polymerase III, complete with 3D glasses, thanks to an impromptu collaboration with the Psychology department!
• For those who like to see the things we work with, we had a display of of E. coli on plates, under a microscope and in broth. Children and adults alike were fascinated by our live experiment, extracting DNA from bananas using everyday kitchen equipment.

We took every chance to mingle with the crowd and to answer questions. The varying exhibits were helpful in starting discussions. Being able to refer to an actual colony of E. coli or the 3D structure of Taq pol III made these discussions more interesting.

Team member Josi Buerger presented a lively talk "Spider Mutants and Bioterrorism - an Overview of Synthetic Biology as an Emerging Scientific Discipline" to an audience over eighty strong at TEDx University of St Andrews. She revealed the ground-breaking but occasionally controversial nature of synthetic biology and iGEM's role within it. Members of the audience showed surprise at the progress, discussions and possibilities that synthetic biology represents.

Josi recounts that the other talks and the audience were mainly in the field of the social sciences and that her talk had impressed the audience with its originality and raised questions they would otherwise have left unasked.

Here's the TEDx profile for the event at the main TED website.