• Collaborations
  • Israel
  • Norwich
• BioTech 2020+
• Missions
• SYNMIKRO
• SynBio Day
• Debate
• Hessentag
• Lab Day
• Peter Hermentin
• Bioethics

As synthetic biology is a relatively new and promising field of modern biology it is important to give prospective young academics an understanding of this topic. Therefore we organized a practical one-day-course on August 30th for high-school students of a local school (Elisabethschule Marburg). After a short introduction about synthetic biology, iGEM and our project PHAECTORY, the invited advanced-biology course students performed a Gibson assembly of four fragments and verified the correct assembled product via a PCR and agarose gelelectrophoresis. And it worked just fine! As a typical method in synthetic biology to assemble great numbers of DNA fragments within a couple of hours, Gibson assembly was the perfect example for current cloning strategies and the difference between classical approaches of gene technology and synthetic biology. Between the practical parts of the experiment members of our PHAECTORY iGEM team gave seminars about Gibson assembly, classical gene technology and PCR. Additionally, this day gave the pupils the perfect opportunity to apply what they have just learned in school about DNA and PCR.

We all had a lot of fun working with the young students and we think they had too. All in all, it was a very positive experience and we hope we could convince all of them that synthetic biology is great.