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Our main human practices project will be to participate in Researchers' Night, which is an event for high school students and students from non-degree granting colleges. The goal of researchers' night is to show the students that research is fun, to inspire them, and to motivate them to take higher education. As a second outreach project, the team will be writing a chapter on different biobrick assembly methods in a textbook.
We also concider our Matchmaker an important part of our outreach effort. Read more about it here.
This year, the NTNU iGEM team is participating in Researchers' Night, which is an arrangement for high school students. This is the eighth year Researchers' night is being arranged, and it has traditionally been very popular at NTNU. Last year, over 1200 students visited the arrangement. This year, Researchers' night will be arranged the 28th of september, and we have been inveted to participate. We are really looking forward to it, since this is a unique opportunity to tell students about the possibilities of synthetic biology, and motivate them for a career in biotechnology. It seems that the students are looking forward to it as well, since this year's arrangement was fully booked in 4 minutes! Some photos from last year's event (taken by Kristina Jones, NTNU) can be seen in the carousel below.
This year, the 1100 participating students can visit 31 different stands, one of them being ours. To get the students to understand the concept of giving organisms new characteristic properties by putting together biobricks, we have made a biobrick construction kit, including both DNA and restriction enzymes (a picture of the DNA from the construction kit is given below). We hope that this construction kit will make it easier both to understand why we are able to put together biobricks using certain combinations of restriction enzymes, and we also hope we can teach them what the different sequences that makes a gene are used for.
Early in the semester, we were asked by our advisor, Rahmi Lale, to write a chapter on biobrick assembly methods for a text book he and Svein Valla, Professor at Dept. of Biotechnology, NTNU, are editing. The text book in question is called 'DNA cloning methods', and is part of the book series '[http://www.springer.com/series/7651 Methods in Molecular Biology]' published by Humana Press. We will finalise the chapter after the Europe Regional Jamboree.
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