Outreach

Media

We set out to involve people in our project as well as give people a chance to learn more about biology. This we did through several media and social networks. Our University took a great interest in our project and helped us set up an interview with Teknat samverkan at our Synbioday. Another of the media we met up with was TV4, which is the biggest TV-network in Sweden. They interviewed us in our lab to show an image to people of what happens in a lab and to ask about the project as well as possible issues with GMO. To reach out to a broader audience we used Facebook and Twitter which we consistently updated to let people who followed us know about our progress. Our biggest prominent media appearance was at the cover of Nature Review´s tenth year anniversary edition where our chromo proteins were published.

Figure 1.Nature Reviews iGEM 2013 Chromoprotein in this article: http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v11/n10/covers/index.html	Figure 2. The interview of our project on TV4 (in swedish), which is the biggest TV-network in Sweden, link here http://www.tv4play.se/program/nyheterna-uppsala?video_id=2414690
Figure 3.Our University showed great interest in our project, and wrote an article (in swedish) about us here http://www.uu.se/nyheter/nyhet-visning/?id=2822&area=2%2C5%2C16&typ=artikel&na&lang=sv	Figure 4. The graph shows how many people viewed our posts on Facebook from July to September. We can see that the interest for our Facebook page is increasing and our record for a single day is over 1500 people visiting.

High school

Another important part in our human practice project was to spread the word about synthetic biology to the next generation of scientists. One of the first things we did in the spring were to travel around visiting different high schools. There we talked and discussed the fascinating subject that is synthetic biology. We have also started collaborations with biotechnology high school students to enable projects together with them in the future, with the goal of increasing their knowledge about synthetic biology and hopefully evoking an interest in this subject.

Pictures from one of our many visits to different high schools. The first photo showing some of our members talking about synthetic biology and the second one showing a glimpse of the introduction of our presentation for the students, where a short animated film was previewed.