Indian Summer

Indian Summer is a dance festival organized in Alkmaar, The Netherlands. The festival centers around 5 big stages that all play different kinds of music. However, except for music, there is are many different things to do, one of them being a big science dome.

People from different universities across The Netherlands and from some companies where present in the science dome. presenting cutting edge research that was packed in an accessible way. Most of the stands were centerd around sustainability.

As an iGEM team we worked together with Sciencelinx to promote synthetic biology. In order to get people to notice our stand we displayed bacterial paintings. The paintings were agar plates on which bacteria of different colours were plated. After about 2 days of growing, the bacteria colonies formed nice patterns. We had six painting, of 50 by 50 cm, all displaying different iconic scene's. Scene's like the province of Groningen and even the iGEM logo.

The 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.