Outreach

As a team, we have done substantial community outreach, including meeting key stakeholders and gaining more knowledge about our the recycling industry and our community. These outreach experiences overall helped us to enhance our project’s idea.

Bow Valley Regional Science Fair

Our first step into the outreach world was going to the Bow Valley Regional Science Fair, where we set up an interactive “Bio-Painting” kiosk, using the Amino Lab kit materials. We let students and parents use coloured bacteria (pre-transformed and prepared in “painting kits”) to draw on agar plates. The team did this in order to help the public better understand synthetic biology and to alleviate concerns around its safety and applicability.

Meeting with Bow Valley Waste Management

Months later, we had the idea of working with plastics. We talked with the Head of Waste Management in the Bow Valley, Peter Duck, who explained to us that the recycling of plastics is relatively easy and efficient. Rather, it is the sorting of plastics that proves challenging, and mis-sorted plastic cannot be recycled (therefore ending up in landfills). This critical meeting led to an entire pivot of our project, changing our direction completely.

Visiting Recycling & Sorting Facilities and Alberta Recycling Conference

We visited both our local bottle depot and recycling sorting facility to watch the process of sorting and even attempted to sort plastic ourselves. Some of our team members also attended the Alberta Recycling conference in Lake Louise to gain more contacts, and a first-hand appreciation for how plastics are sorted and recycled in our own community, as well as around our province, country, and the world.

Reaching Out To The Local Newspaper

In the spring of 2018 we were interviewed by our local newspaper, The Rocky Mountain Outlook. This amazing experience allowed some of our members to spread the word of our project and to inform our own community. This article explained and answered any ethical concerns or questions, along with giving us an outlet, in which we could ask for support of the community.

Excerpt from our local newspaper (online).

Reaching Out To Businesses & Financial Groups

Some of our members reached out to our local Bow Valley Credit Union where we an opportunity to pitch our project in hopes of gaining some financial support for bringing our project to Boston to share with the synthetic biology community.

Collaborations

With the extensive support we receive from Mindfuel’s geekStarter program, many collaborations were made possible this year, both with High school and Collegiate iGEM teams. Three different Mindfuel events were held in the last year, which brought the following teams together to share our ideas and project successes, and to troubleshoot and support one another with stumbling blocks:

• Notre Dame Collegiate iGEM
• Lethbridge High School iGEM
• University of Calgary iGEM
• University of Calgary BioMod
• University of Lethbridge iGEM
• University of Alberta iGEM

Through these meaningful collaboration events, we got to know other students working in Synthetic Biology and made meaningful connections with other experts and mentors in the field. In particular, we are grateful to have met the U of Alberta iGEM team, who worked with Dr. Robert E. Campbell, who was an expert in mCherry, and provided us with a sample of purified mCherry lysate for our spectrophotometric assays!

We had hoped to connect more closely with the Tianjin 2016 iGEM team members since our PET-hydrolase constructs were intended to be modifications and improvements upon their excellent work. Unfortunately, we did not get any responses from our emails or social media outreach to Tianjin 2016, and so we were not able to collaborate with them.