At every step of our project, we have exchanged about it with the public and professionals, through recurrent meetings with our supervisors, various interviews, an online survey, and a conference. We have collected their opinions and pieces of advice to take all of these data into account to improve the relevance and the safety of our project.

We gradually changed the focus of our project according to the interviews performed and went from producing sugar to building a tool to improve an uncommon chassis in synthetic biology . Our meetings have also given us current juridical knowledge and public opinion about GMOs. Concerning safety, very interesting alternative systems for the photobioreactor design such as biocontainment measures were brought out with all of the experts we met. All of our meetings were a very useful source of information for the definition of a relevant project and for the improvement of our photobioreactor safety.

Throughout the year, we were constantly communicating about our project, the iGEM competition, and synthetic biology. We have reached a large public through different actions. Indeed, we have organized a professional conference about synthetic biology in collaboration with two other French iGEM teams. To introduce the subject to the next generations, we held an animation for 3 days at the national science fair where we spoke about synthetic biology and C. reinhardtii for the large public including children. We also gave a lecture to high school students and sold food in our university in order to present iGEM to our university’s students and non-biologist professors. To reach people around the world we use social media through which we communicate about our project, our experiments and the iGEM competition. Finally, as we deeply give value to understanding the public view and fears about synthetic biology, we created a survey that we shared to the largest public as a tool that helped us address this issue