Team:Warsaw/HumanPractices

Faculty of Biology at the University of Warsaw organized „Biologists' Night” - event addressed to high school students, who think about studying biological science. During that event, we ran a stand about synthetic biology.

The Faculty of Biology at the University of Warsaw organized „Biologists' Night” - an event addressed to high school students, who consider studying biological science. During that event, we ran a stand about synthetic biology. Those who visited our stand could get an idea about standard biological parts, hear names and functions of basic BioBricks such as promoters, rbs, terminators and protein coding parts. To make the whole idea clearer for them, we prepared special puzzles, which they could put together to form a plasmid with promotor, rbs, GFP protein and terminator. After that short introduction, we showed them partregistry website and gave quick instruction on how they can use it to learn more about BioBricks.

For those who were less into microbiology, we prepared a model of a bacterial cell. From that interactive model, they could learn about the composition of the bacterial cell, as well as hear a little bit more about organelles which interested them the most. We also showed the students dishes with bacterial colonies, which expressed fluorescent proteins. To show them how they glow, we had a UV lamp on our stand.

After their visit to our stand, the students could take part in a quiz, which we prepared for this occasion. The questions were based on things which they had learned while using our models of plasmid and bacterial cell. Those, who had answered correctly won little gifts from us, which were pens or pencils.

In our opinion, our project for the Biologist's Night was a great success - our stand was one of the most visited!

We took part in the students' scientific bioinformatical conference “Numbers, Computers, Life” which was organized by the Faculty of Mathematics and IT at the Jagielonian University in Krakow. Two members of our team prepared, and gave a presentation about the idea of synthetic biology and how it is connected with bioinformatics. During their speech, they talked about the basics of synthetic biology and the iGEM competition. They also mentioned the project prepared by the iGEM Warsaw Team last year.

During the poster session three members of our team presented our last year's iGEM poster. Both presentation and poster have been well received at the conference. Students had lots of question to the presenters. Thanks to that, one of them even visited us during the holidays to do her summer practice, but two weeks later, she decided to become a member of our team since she loved the project so much! :)

Our instructor gave a presentation on Synthetic biology at the Second International Scientific Seminar ‘Science-Society-Didactics’ at the Institute of Biology at the Pedagogical University of Cracow. He explained the basis of the subject and how it differs from the ordinary approach to biology. The audience were mostly experienced biology teachers, who, surprisingly, did not have much of an idea of synthetic biology. Thankfully, the audience was very enthusiastic about the subject and the presentation stirred their imagination.