Discovery festival is an annual science and arts festival that takes place at the night of 28 September. Previous years, the festival was only held in Amsterdam, this year it was extra huge with a festival in Eindhoven, Rotterdam and Amsterdam at the same time! Together with iGEM Amsterdam, iGEM Eindhoven and iGEM Wageningen we represented iGEM at all three locations. Visitors could experience how synthetic biology works in our improvised laboratory, explore the possibilities and give suggestions for cool synthetic biology projects themselves.

We had a great time with the iGEM team from Amsterdam. The visitors were very enthousiastic to see what we do on a regular day in the lab. They were provided with insight on what you can do with bacteria. Most of the audience did not know the existence of synthetic biology so we hope that we gave them a bit more insight in this topic.

Of the European iGEM teams who applied, we were selected to speak at the conference of the Transnatural Festival in Nemo, Amsterdam! This festival is held every two years and aims to highlight art, science and technology in which state-of-the-art technology goes together with nature. This year’s theme was “smart as matter”. You can find some pictures on the presentation page!

Designer Leen van Wijngaarden was fascinated by the colors and shapes of bacterial colonies and decided to make art with them. Not just a pretty picture on a small regular agar plate, like this well-known example, but on a large scale. This should produce nice paintings, which keep evolving into "Bacterial Beauties". iGEM Groningen 2012 assisted with preparing the XL agar plates and painting them with bacteria. Resulting in beautiful pictures, that were exposed at the Night of Arts and Science, a festival in Groningen which attracted 15.000 visitors.

Because of the microbiological background of many team members, we could not only help Leen during the making of the pictures, but we could also take the opportunity to teach the visitors of the Night about the beauty of bacteria, their use, synthetic biology, and our project.

In addition to the bio-paintings and the huge "bio-billboard", time lapse movies of bacteria growing on a normal plate, and microscopic images of bacteria were displayed. Furthermore, to aid in explaining synthetic biology, our team showed some paintings with an overview of our project.

As an extra feature, a "bacterial wall of fame" was built using handprints of "famous people from Groningen". People, including some iGEM members, had pressed their hands on agar plates, which were then incubated overnight. During the night the diverse skin inhabitants flourished...

We assisted Leen again at the preparations of the performing arts festival Noorderzon. This annual festival in the city of Groningen draws around 110.000 visitors. Every year, the education institutes in Groningen build up a science centre during the festival called “Qu3” (link). In front of the Qu3 our bio-billboard was evolving rapidly in the hot, hot weather!