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From 2013.igem.org

Indian Summer

What is it

Indian Summer is a dance festival organized in Alkmaar the Netherlands. The crowd that attends this festival is really diverse, from all age categories. The festival centres around 5 big stages that all play different kinds of music. however on the festival grounds there are many different things to see and do. One of these is a big science dome, which housed people from many different universities as well as some companies. In this dome there were many different stands all presenting cutting edge research, package in a accessible way.

What were we doing there

Most of the stands were centred around sustainability, we were there to talk about synthetic biology of course. In order to get people to notice our stand we displayed bacterial paintings. The were agar plates on which bacteria of different colours were plated. After about 2 days of growing the bacteria colonies formed a nice patterns. We had six painting, of 50 by 50 cm, in total, all displaying different iconic scene's. Scene's like the province of Groningen and even the iGEM logo.

What was the reception

These paintings were used as a conversation starter to talk about synthetic biology, in general its principles and applications. People were really interested each time the topic of the iGEM competition came up. The mention of previous year projects like the hydrophobic biofilm and the food warden were really inspiring to people. In general people were very interested in what we were doing, and posted a lot of questions.