HUMAN PRACTICES
Silver criteria
Visit from Forensic Biologist Dr. Mark Benecke
Dr. Mark Benecke, a known forensic biologist not only in Germany but also worldwide, did not only work for the FBI, but also became a forensic expert for biological traces after moving back to Germany. Therefore he plays an important role in solving criminal problems in our country.
Dr. Benecke immediately caught our attention when he gave a talk at the March for Science in Cologne, as he is a open minded and interesting person. His research field, his profession and especially the way he is teaching people about science encouraged us to invite him to our university to present our work and our lab.
Luckily he accepted our invitation and visited us on August 27. We had a very extensive and captivating conversation with him, receiving great advice regarding our story, our project and our way of presenting us. By encouraging us he motivated us to make it to Boston and made us even more enthusiastic about iGEM. We had a lot of fun, especially when recording a video about synthetic biology and our project for the public. This way we created a funny, informative and an internationally accessible brief description of our “Trinity”.
Since Dr. Benecke is a worldwide known influencer, we hope that synthetic biology will receive a broader public reach and engagement due to his visit to our laboratory.
Our successful meeting with Mark Benecke can be seen on the social media platform of our university and is also visible on Mark Benecke's facebook page, ensuring that synthetic biology, the idea behind iGEM and our “Trinity”, is spread.
We would like to thank Dr. Benecke for his support and his thoughtful words. We really appreciate his input and learned a lot from his advice.
We hope that we were able to reach a wider audience with our collaboration with Mark Benecke and were able to show that synthetic biology is not dangerous, but on the contrary, very fun and helpful.
A Survey for Everyone
To assess the public’s opinion regarding a future possibility to utilize our toolbox for the synthesis of probiotics, we created a survey with a couple of questions.
We did not only share this survey on our social media accounts for a short time, but also went to one of Germany’s biggest supermarkets to personally ask customers what they think about genetically engineered probiotics. In total we achieved a participation count of 267 including young community members starting from 14 years and up to older people. Among the participants, male and female people were almost distributed equally.
Most of the participants were relatively young, ranging from 14 to 30 years old, which is why we considered that the vast majority of the survey was filled out online. Because of the results from question 3, seen in Figure 1, we assume that most participants are students, probably biologists and familiar with synthetic biology and its hazards. In contrast to that, most of the people we addressed at the supermarket were older, between 30 and 50 years old and frequently even older (+60 years old).
This observation is further enhanced when looking at the answer of question 3: Here most of the participants admitted to having an academic degree. Most survey attendants at the supermarket did not hold an academic degree, but mostly rather had a lower secondary school level or no degree at all.
Interestingly, independent of age, gender and degree, most of the participants are aware that the intestinal flora has an impact on human health. This conveys that everyone has already heard something about the gut microbiome and the fact that there are indeed living organisms somehow working to improve our health.
However, when looking at the most frequent answer to question five, some of the participants have never consciously taken probiotics to improve their health. When asking this question in the supermarket, most of the people did not immediately know what probiotics are or what they consist of, until we named some known examples of probiotics and explained them that they harbour microorganisms. This outcome is very peculiar, as most of them are aware that our gut microbiome plays a huge role in our daily life, yet they do not consciously try to improve their health by for example consuming probiotics.
We believe that this result is due to the lack of trivial information in everyday life which we realized when we encountered a woman suffering from Crohn’s disease in the supermarket. Even though she belonged to the older subgroup of participants, she was very well informed about synthetic biology, GMOs and potential harms. Her age however did not keep her from approving of the consumption of genetically modified organisms if this would improve her health.
Moreover, also when considering the answers of question 6 it can be clearly seen that for us seemingly simple questions like: “What do you consider a genetically modified organism?”, were frequently answered incorrectly. This became obvious to us at the supermarket, when looking at the people struggling to answer this question.
All in all we observed a trend at the supermarket during our chats with the customers. We got the impression that young adults with higher academic degrees tended to be more aware of GMOs. However, similar to the other participants, they rejected the consumption of GMOs as well, even if this would improve their health.
This clearly indicates that the public is still not very familiar with synthetic biology and its potential benefits.
The last question was whether people would agree to the consumption of genetically engineered probiotics. With our survey and with our personal interaction with the public at the supermarket we can conclude that there is a tendency and acceptance of people to consume synthetically engineered probiotics. We had the impression, that the ones denying the consumption of genetically modified organisms had a distorted image of synthetic biology due to lack of public knowledge regarding this issue.
Cyano 2018: 3rd Early Career Research Symposium on Cyanobacteria
One of the major key players in our co-culture is Synechococcus elongatus, a cyanobacterium that provides the other organisms with carbon.
Every year a conference on cyanobacteria takes place in Germany where experts meet and discuss recent progress, research and their current projects. Last year it was held at our university in Duesseldorf, which is why our advisors knew of it and advised us to visit the conference this year.
We sent the organizers of this symposium an abstract of our project and were actually accepted to present our project in a 20 minute talk.
On the 12th of September two of our members started their trip to Freiburg, a beautiful city in the South of Germany, where the 3rd symposium for cyanobacteria was held for three days. We were greeted with a lot of sun and temperatures up to 80 °F (30 °C), whereas the other members of our team had to freeze at 15 °C in our lab.
Every day a couple of talks were held in addition to a presentation from a keynote speaker.
On the first day a team of Serbian scientists presented their research on cyanobacteria in their natural habitat. Slađana Popović even found a new species in a cave in Serbia! Christoph Howe then talked about his idea to use cyanobacterium biofilms for H2 production for biofuels.
Another interesting idea was the one of Moritz Koch. He presented his idea of cyanobacteria as a PHB producer - a carbon friendly bioplastic against the pollution of the sea on the second day.
In between poster session and discussions we were able to socialize with other cyanobacteria researchers. The organizers even offered a guided tour to the Münster - a famous church in Freiburg and a hike to the Schlossberg (castle rock) which offered a great view over Freiburg and the surrounding hills.
The last day of the conference was the big day for us: We got to present our co-culture project in front of the real experts of cyanobacteria.
After explaining what the iGEM competition is to a lot of the people who hadn’t heard of it, we started detailing our concept around the cyanobacteria in the planned co-culture.
After the talk the audience ended up starting a discussion about our strategy. We are very thankful for the mentioned advice and tried to integrate all the input in our work.
Expert Discussion with a Pharmacy Employee
The gut flora is a very important network of organisms in our bodies. Itie has a big impact on our overall health, wellbeing and recovery. Just like other microbial consortia, these networks have not yet been extensively studied. Even though it is such a significant aspect of our health affecting drug absorption we try to establish synthetic co-cultures with our toolbox that can be used in many diverse fields. We thought it would be a great idea to talk to an expert about it. Hence, we invited Mrs. Küpper, an employee of the Paracelsus pharmacy.
After quickly introducing us and iGEM we gave her a presentation about our project and our goals with it for society.
Just like others Mrs. Küpper was very interested and asked many questions about our co-culture.
Especially impressive to her was the fact that the co-culture toolbox can be used in many possible ways - either for production, the cultivation of different organisms, simple research or as probiotics.
She informed us that probiotics currently arouse not only the interest of companies but also of her customers. Every week new products emerge on the market and are sent to the drug store. A lot more people also come to the pharmacy and ask for probiotics against diarrhea or stomach trouble even without being sent by their physicians. A lot of doctors still prescribe antibiotics even for minor illnesses which could be treated otherwise, thus accepting the damage of their patients’ gut flora. Some customers use probiotics to counter the side effects. Some physicians - unfortunately not all - recommend probiotics to their patients.
Mrs. Küpper also noted that most of her customers are aware that probiotics are living organisms which is why they often ask for the correct storage of the medicine. Dead organisms are used as a sort of vaccine to start the immune system - but then they are not called probiotics anymore.
Since they are not subject to medical prescription the customers need to pay for them themselves. German health insurance doesn’t cover the costs.
In the end she also suggested other applications of our toolbox. The differently built, but similar functioning networks of organisms also exist on the skin or in the mouth that - being impaired - can also cause illnesses. According to her our toolbox could provide important research for those as well.
Synthetic Biology and Waffles
Our idea behind the small information booth paired with waffle sales was to capture the general knowledge of the students of our university about synthetic biology while “baiting” them with delicious self-made food.
We organized a quiz with general questions about microorganisms, genetic engineering and molecular biology where everybody was able to participate.
It was interesting to see that biology seems to be very complicated and incomprehensible to many. Many students who were not familiar with biology at all, often failed at the quiz but then were cheered up with a delicious waffle and every information they asked for. Some terms like amino acids and DNA were not familiar to a bunch of participants, but few were able to put the terms into the right context. However, there were some students who had solid knowledge in synthetic biology - despite studying something else - and were also interested in the iGEM competition itself. We were happy to share our knowledge with them and to draw them under the spell of biology while handing out more waffles.
A few other students were already familiar with the iGEM competition itself and visited our booth to find out what this year's topic is about. We were delighted to present our project and were also able to inspire some non-biologists with our idea.
All in all, we were able to arouse interest in synthetic biology with our information booth and were able to enjoy a bunch of waffles.
Hopefully we were able to contribute to bringing the wonderful world of synthetic biology to many new people and to take away their fear of this often unknown science.
Radio Interview
The [97.1] Hochschulradio Düsseldorf is a universitarian radio station hosted voluntarily by students of different study fields. Even though there is a lot going on at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences the station only has seldomly the chance to welcome guests with a scientific background which is why they were very happy to invite us. Our team members Salima and Carina were interviewed by Cigdem Ünlü on June 18 at their radio station.
Our goal was to change their problem, introduce iGEM to a bunch of folks who listen to the station and advertise the upcoming talks of our lecture series.
When we entered the station we were quite surprised: It’s located in a normal apartment in a big residential block for students. After we were greeted we began right away with asking a lot of questions since we were pretty nervous: Are we prepared enough, what language style should we use, how should we deal with bloopers and who was going to say the important stuff. But it turned out that they were actually quite easy going so we had nothing to worry about.
Cigdem began asking us many questions as soon as we met to prepare for our conversation. Once she was ready, our interview began and everything was broadcasted live.
At first we were asked about the iGEM competition to give the audience an idea about what it actually is for. iGEM might be well known among scientific faculty members and science students at our university but students in other fields of study are usually not familiar with the term.
After the quick introduction to the competition we started explaining synthetic biology in more detail - which is a quite unknown expression as well - and gave examples of what we’re actually dealing with next to our research, such as sponsoring, meetings with experts, modeling and spreading the world about synthetic biology.
This was a perfect transition to our past and upcoming outreach projects that Salima quickly presented. We invited all fellow students to come. Our interviewer was quite happy to know that those events were also for non-scientist without any knowledge in synthetic biology.
Next we had to answer why we joined the iGEM team and mentioned practical experience, our own project and exponential growth eeh learning curves as our motivation.
This led to our current project - the co-culture consisting of three organisms. We tried to explain our plan in a way that was also understandable for people who didn’t know much about biology. Cigdem asked whenever something was too complicated which gave us a great sense as to what might be hard to understand when you’re not dealing with it everyday and every night.
Before the interview ended we were once again allowed to advertise our upcoming lecture series talks on the radio.
All in all it was a very interesting experience to talk in front of people you can’t see which gives you a rather odd feeling. We learned how to describe a complex project to people with little knowledge about specific mechanisms and were able to reach people beyond our usually scientifically interested audience.
V-Bio Karl-von-Frisch Award Ceremony
Every year the VBIO - an association to promote biology - awards excellent high school graduates in Biology a prize. Just like the previous year the iGEM team Duesseldorf helped to welcome the students and gave a talk about the iGEM competition in general and their project.
Four members of our team took the train on June 26 and arrived at noon at the BioMedizinZentrum (BMZ) in Dortmund. After meeting Professor Susanne Bickel and the organiser, we helped them distribute badges to the students in order to mark them as guests. Some cakes and beverages later, Dipl.-Ing. Michael Kuhn started to give a short introduction about the center. Professor Susanne Bickel then explained the VBIO association, with their goals and tasks and made some advertisement for it, showing the advantages for students.
After the students came back from a tour that led through the center, it was our turn to present.
We explained the iGEM competition in detail, presented efforts and project ideas of other teams, showed what our current work in the laboratory looks like and presented goals we have in mind for our project. Afterwards, we were drilled with questions. The students showed a lot of interest in the iGEM competition and were curious about possible teams to join. Even a few teachers chimed in.
In the end we had an interesting discussions with some teachers and students regarding our project ideas and our progress.
We left feeling happy about the motivation and inspiration we were able to give.
Visit of Fabian Nienhaus - Karl-von-Frisch Laureate
At the Karl-von-Frisch award ceremony we got to know a high school graduate who was awarded for his excellent achievement in biology. He wrote an outstanding term paper, in which he co-cultivated Bacillus subtilis and the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. One of the hypotheses he offered for the behavior he observed is that the co-cultivation forced one population to produce an antibiotic substance as a defense mechanism.
At the Karl-von-Frisch award ceremony he expressed interest in the iGEM competition and our project. Because he still had numerous questions regarding our co-culturing project after the event, we invited him to visit our university and our lab. That is why Fabian traveled the long way from the Münsterland to Düsseldorf to get more insight into our project.
In order to give him a tour of our working places and laboratories, we gave him a complete safety instruction, as required by the lab we work in. Armed with a lab coat and safety goggles we explained to him, among others things, general techniques used in laboratory work with nucleic acids and microorganisms and showed him our beautiful cyanobacteria.
Since our project and his term paper cover closely related topics we had a great discussion about similarities like the use of co-cultivation, but also differences, for example symbiotic vs. combating combinations for co-cultivating.
The time flew by fast and soon Fabian had to start his way home. He will always be welcomed in our lab and we wish him success in his pursuit of a medical degree.
