Textile production, and specifically textile dyeing, is one of the biggest water polluters in the world. However, people may not notice that the textile or clothes that they are wearing right now might be a big threat to clean water. In order to help the general public to understand how the textile industry influences our daily lives, we brought the hidden facts of the textile industry to light. The facts can be illuminated by shining a UV flashlight on them.

The plasmid puzzle was one of the four activities that our team developed for the Heureka weekend event. The primary purpose of the activity was to educate people about plasmids and how they can be utilized in synthetic biology to help produce desired proteins. To accomplish that, we wanted to involve the visitors in an engaging and interactive way to sort of create their own plasmid in order to successfully express a protein.

The plasmid puzzle game in its completed form.

The underlying idea of the plasmid puzzle was to portray a plasmid with the help of an electric circuit. Through several cycles of ideation, prototyping, and testing in an iterative fashion, we made a final product that used conductive dough to represent the phosphate backbone strands of DNA, while LEDs with their positive and negative legs (anode and cathode) between two dough strands represented base pairs of DNA. Additionally, electric cables with magnetic ends were used to represent a ribosome, and a motor covered with dough was used to represent a protein. The target audience was a bit older children (10+ years and older), as the game consisted of multiple steps and contained small parts. Both English and Finnish versions of the game were prepared for the audience.

The first step of the game is to mold and place the right colored conductive dough in their respective places in the plasmid template, which were the origin of replication, target gene, and selective marker. The second step is to fill the color-coded LEDs to their right position according to what base pair is being asked for in the template. The final step is to plant the ribosome between the target gene and protein to make the protein spin.

Guiding a visitor through the steps of the plasmid game.

Overall, both children and adults seemed to enjoy the plasmid puzzle, as playing with conductive dough and LEDs allowed the visitors to immerse themselves while trying to understand the purpose and functionality of plasmids. Also, the surrounding descriptions and information around the game template gave the adults and teenagers an opportunity to have a deeper learning experience about what the plasmid and its parts are and why they are important.

In one of our workshops, visitors could extract DNA from blueberries and lingonberries using safe household chemicals. We also taught children about what DNA is and what it does.

The instructions for DNA extraction.

DNA extraction in progress.

The results of extracting DNA from blueberries and lingonberries.

After completing the DNA extraction workshop, visitors could use the resulting DNA juice to dye pieces of cotton fabric. The pieces that weren't taken home by visitors were used to create an art installation.

The instructions for dyeing with berries.

Dyed fabric.

A part of the art installation created with dyed fabric.

Speaking at the Synthetic Biology course.

In the beautiful setting of Design Factory, we first presented to them what iGEM consists of and what our project is about. As they are potential future biology students, we believed that these bright minds could be interested in taking part in iGEM in the upcoming years, so we informed them about the competition.

After that, we moved to a more relaxed environment – Design Factory’s sauna space, where we enjoyed snacks together and informally discussed university studies and work perspectives for biologists, as well as the International Biology Olympiad itself.

A relaxed evening with the Biology Olympiad team.

iGEM Cradle of Ideas poster.

The seminar garnered a relatively small audience of about twenty people, but it was also streamed on Facebook and later uploaded there for more people to see. The topic was well-received and generated some discussion about textile dyeing and synthetic biology. We got the impression that the audience had a positive view on synthetic biology and they trusted its capability to solve major problems.

An example of our presentation slides: visualizing some of our plasmids.

The speakers at the Science Basement.