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).
Realization
The poster of our project, we presented at Street Science.
Our poster to illustrate the development of biology to Synthetic Biology.
In Bielefeld we organized the booth in cooperation with [http://www.bielefeld-marketing.de/de/index.html Bielefeld Marketing]. We had prepared a lot of different things. For example a microscope to have a look on microorganisms and “wanted poster” for the organisms. For kids we had organized pipettes and lab coats to feel like scientists. They could pipet colored water and merge it, to see how colors change. We also held small competitions: jump roping with ropes made of reaction tubes and pipette tip sticking. The kids could win golden Bluecaps filled with sweets and we made sure they won all the time. For the adult visitors we presented posters to understand our project and our approach and for everyone we had planned an experiment for DNA extraction. For our DNA extraction we took a experiment from [http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM_Outreach:Activities CommunityBricks] and modified it.
We wanted our common day to be multimedial, so we showed a video about [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD5uNAMbDaQ Synthetic Biology] (taken from [http://technyou.edu.au/fun-stuff/videos/video-transcripts/ TechNyou]. Credits to the iGEM Team from Bonn for translating, thank you. Click [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bykAeGMMosI 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 [http://www.wikipedia.org/ wikipedia] and from working groups of our university.
Of course we wanted to know what people thought about our common day. Did they understand our goals and how was their opinion? Here you can read more about the evalution of the feedback.
Conclusion
Additionals
| 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
|
"
