Team:York UK/Outreach.html

St Lawrence School - Bacterial Superheroes

Our team was keen on making children in York enthusiastic about science and the wonders of Synthetic Biology! With this in mind, they set out to St Lawrence School, where they spent one day running a workshop with students from years 3-6.

The workshop, called 'Bacterial Superheroes', introduced the children to some of the special powers bacteria can have, such as surviving in extreme temperatures, changing the colour of their environment, glowing and, of course, producing gold. Then, children were encouraged to invent their own type of superhero, bacteria which can solve a worldwide problem, by using some of these properties. Children came up with amazing ideas, which they drew on paper and presented in front of the class. The best ideas received prizes. Here are some of the ones that caught our eye:

• Using bacteria which can survive in the cold and glow, to populate icebergs; in this way, icebergs will glow at night and ships will not run into them anymore.
• Bacteria which can be eaten and, once in our stomach, produce a special substance (iGEM York suggestion, pheromones). Then, you offer the person you like the same type of food with bacteria, and once the bacteria produce the substance inside them, they fall in love with you.
• By the end of the workshop, children learnt what bacteria are, that not all of them are bad, that they can be modified in the lab by scientists to have special properties that these properties can lead to the invention of useful products. And that science can be fun and they themselves can be scientists one day.

St. Helen's Church

In late September we were given the opportunity to carry out an Outreach event in a church in the centre of York. The Church Wardens, Anthony and Margaret, allowed us to use their building to help promote a positive relationship between religion and science. The aim of the event was to meet as broad a range of people as possible and engage in discussions about the sort of research we’re involved in. We wanted to find out if and what they knew about synthetic biology as a branch of science and also to educate them as to what it was we’d been up to over the summer.

We ran a simple demonstration which allowed members of the public to extract the DNA from their own cheek cells and take it away with them in a PCR tube. To do this we asked people to take a 10mL drink of orange juice and swill it around their mouth, chewing on their cheeks a little to dislodge as many cells as possible, before spitting the liquid back out into the beaker. Next we added this to 1mL of salt solution (8g or NaCl diluted in 92mL of distilled water) in a test tube. We then added 1mL of soap solution (ordinary washing up liquid mixed with distilled water in a 1:3 dilution). The detergent lyses the cells and exposes the DNA to the salt which interacts with the proteins surrounding your DNA and causes them to precipitate. We then slowly added 5mL of ice cold 100% ethanol which allowed the precipitated DNA to become more visible and scooped out into a smaller PCR tube which also contained ethanol. We then added a drop of food colouring to make the DNA more visible and then glued the lid shut before letting people take them home as a souvenir.

As well as this we asked people to fill in a simple questionnaire aimed to find out what people knew about SynBio and how it was viewed by the general public. You can see the data we collected here (sample size was 70):

There were a few other things we noticed when speaking to people about the project. First of all, we found that people who had a scientific background, either as a career or as a personal interest, often said they knew less about the field of Synthetic Biology than those with no knowledge at all. It seems that the more people actually know about science the less they feel they know- the more aware they are of the vast expanse of things to learn. Another thing we didn’t expect was the demographic of people who attended the event. We expected a lot of children to participate in the DNA Extraction experiment but in fact it was the adults who enjoyed it the most, especially some of the older visitors.

To summarise, the day was a roaring success. We feel people had a very good time experimenting with their DNA and think they learned a lot about our project, the competition and SynBio in general. The most novel aspect of this event was definitely the location, we were able to bring the world of science and religion together in a setting which is not often associated with the sort of jobs we do. This event would not have been possible without the generosity of the Church Staff and the help of some of our friends studying Genetics at the University of York; Tsvetelina, Elena and Jenny.

Alumni event

We have taken part in the Open day event for Alumni students, which was held at the Biology Department. It was a great opportunity for the York Graduates to see some of the on-going research in the Department and to be brought up to date with the projects funded by the York Annual Fund. Since our project received a significant amount of money from this fund, we were very excited about meeting the people, who actually paid for our research. Most of the people, who came were very excited by our work and were looking forward to learning more about it. Overall this outreach event was a great success as we managed to raise awareness of our project as well as the iGEM competition in general.

This could become a start of iGEM in The University of York and provide opportunities for young researchers to get more involved in synthetic biology.