Team:Thessaloniki/Public Engagement

Public Engagement

Public Engagement

As a project competing in the foundational advance track, we faced difficulties in our efforts to properly communicate our work. We contacted Asterios Arampatzis, Team Leader of iGEM Greece 2017, in order to gain some insight about the problems they may have met and dealt with, regarding the communication of Synthetic Biology and their project to the world. He shared with us his experience, stating that synthetic biology is nearly absent from our country, as the public has not been properly informed and there are not many researchers in the field.

This year, we wanted to make sure that the iGEM Foundation, and synthetic biology in general, would come in attention of a larger audience. We aimed to inform people of various ages, scientific backgrounds and nationalities about this new and exciting, yet relatively unknown in our country, scientific field, raise awareness about genetic engineering, discuss about the important ethical issues that come up with synthetic biology’s constant growth and receive valuable feedback for our project’s application and importance to the world.

We organized numerous activities, differentiating our approach depending on the audience. In order to familiarize them with synthetic biology we presented several iGEM projects from previous years that we believed, demonstrate that synthetic biology can prove beneficial in real world problems. We, also, wanted to communicate our project, so wee could gain some feedback and understand the public’s reception of it.

Finally, taking into consideration public’s feedback, we wanted to address the issue of science communication to the public. So, the highlight of our activities this year was the organization of the “SynBalkans Tour”, an educational effort in order to broaden the knowledge about synthetic biology in the Balkan Region, considering the different cultural and scientific background of the audience.

SynBalkans Logo Tour

Motivation

The highlight of our public engagement efforts was the organization of the “SynBalkans Tour”, a series of events dedicated to science communication across the Balkan region. Through this tour, our goal was to form a lasting scientific cooperation between institutes in the Balkan Peninsula and provide students with the opportunity to get acquainted with a novel scientific branch, synthetic biology.

Before the event

Before going on tour, we wanted to make sure that we would be able to engage people with different cultural and scientific backgrounds. We came in contact with professors and students from the Department of Balkan Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia. We learned about the cultural differences between Balkan countries, so that we could differentiate our approach in each country, always taking into consideration their respective cultural and religious beliefs.

Apart from cultural differences we, also, had to take into account the different scientific background of the people going to attend our event, as synthetic biology is characterized by interdisciplinarity. For this reason, we chose to differentiate the content of our presentation, discussing about synthetic biology applications that are closer to the participants’ academic interests.

Along with our project, we used exemples from last year’s iGEM Competition in order to give a good example of synthetic biological circuit utilization. Acknowledgments to iGEM teams Exeter 2017, TUDelft 2017, ETH Zurich 2017, IONIS PARIS 2017, for their inspiring work.

Our Events:

In 5 days, we visited 4 universities in 3 different countries: University of Belgrade and University of Novi Sad (Serbia), University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), University of Split (Croatia).

Students with an academic background in agriculture were especially eager to know how genetically engineered organisms can be used for environmental purposes without posing serious threats to ecosystems. We discussed about the implementation of kill switches in genetically modified organisms and the safety checkpoints that such engineered systems should feature.

University of Belgrade - Faculty of Biology
University of Novi Sad - School of Agriculture
University of Sarajevo - Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences
University of Split - School of Biology and Chemistry

We prepared a short presentation that introduced the audience in the principles and basic tools of Synthetic Biology. First, we introduced our team to the audience. Next, we explained the principles of synthetic biology and mentioned some of its applications (i.e. quorum sensing, metabolic engineering, biosensors). Then, we presented our project, Galene, as well as projects of previous years’ iGEM Teams to demonstrate the use of synthetic biology. The projects used in each presentation were selected depending on the participants field of study. Since bioethics and security have to be seriously considered during a project’s design and execution, we highlighted the efforts of the aforementioned projects to address these issues.

After we wrapped up our presentation, we discussed with students and professors about synthetic biology and the iGEM Competition. Students showed interest in learning more about the engineering principles of synthetic biology. We were happy to elaborate on the use of logic gates and explain them terms such as orthogonality and robustness.

Survey

Finally, students were asked to complete a short questionnaire. Here are the results:

Reception

All professors welcomed the idea of organizing a second visit in the balkan region, where we would have the opportunity to interact with students through synthetic biology workshops.

Dr Jasna Puizina, University of Split, told us that she was impressed that undergraduate students were involved in such a contemporary branch of science. She wanted to learn more about the iGEM Competition and shared with us her interest about the formation of an interbalkan iGEM team. She concluded that she will initiate discussions so that synthetic biology courses will be added in the faculty’s curriculum.

We also had a discussion with Dr Alen Mujcinovic, University of Sarajevo, as he was interested in the entrepreneurship side of iGEM and synthetic biology’s applications in agriculture. He thought that involvement in the iGEM Competition would be a great opportunity for students of the faculty.

Conclusion

As this was our first time presenting in front of such a large audience in English, we believe that this experience will prove very useful to us. We managed to communicate our work to people of other nationalities and interacted with numerous researchers in the Balkan region receiving their comments about our work.

Students participating in our event got to know a lot about Synthetic Biology and, through examples & discussion, understood how synthetic biological circuits can be used in real-world applications.

We have already made plans to continue our activities in the Balkan region, with the organization of interactive workshops and presentations.

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