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From 2013.igem.org

Outreach

Our research has many promising outcomes in the society, from the production of possible bio-fuels and cancer-inhibitors to the hopes of using archaea as a more common host for bio-engineering. Ultimately this research pertains to the field of synthetic biology, a field that we enjoy and want others to be more aware of.

Middle School

Our goal for Outreach was to teach students more about the importance of bacteria/archaea, and how we could use these organisms to help the world around us. In the pictures above, members of the iGEM team are working with Clark Middle School students. The students got a chance to see how much bacteria lived around them after swabbing common areas of the classroom onto agar plates and observing how many colonies grew. They also learned about how we could alter bacteria after looking at plates of bacteria that were engineered to glow in the dark. Ultimately the students learned about the common uses of bacteria, and had a good time doing it.

We believe that this field of synthetic biology is very important for the future. If we expose this area of science and engineering to the younger generations, perhaps they could get more involved and help in this world's challenges of medicine and energy.