HOMEMADE SCIENCE
When we set the goal of communicating our project to children, we realized that we needed to find a way of explaining complex scientific concepts in an easy and practical way. For this reason, we decided to create the series HOMEMADE SCIENCE. It consists in a collection of 4 chapters that propose a simple experiment to do at home with simple procedures and materials. Each chapter explains a concept that is important to understand our project and experiments, in a very easy and practical way.
We made this series of videos in collaboration with Fundació Catalunya - La Pedrera, a foundation based in Barcelona that works, among other things, in fostering vocations and talent in science, medicine and culture. They organize science programs for young people, giving opportunities to hundreds of catalan and international students every year to discover research for the first time. Their Alumni association, Fellows de la Fundació Catalunya - La Pedrera, organizes several activities, both to expand their knowledge about specific areas, such as science communication and design, and to disseminate science and make it more accessible to everyone.
- What are exosomes? - Hydrophobicity
- What do exosomes carry? - Nucleic Acids
- How do exosomes know what is their target tissue? - Attraction & Specificity
- How do we boost exosome production? - Raising bread dough
Herebelow, you can find our collection of videos, posted in our YouTube channel:
We used water, oil and alcohol to explain the concept of hydrophobicity and how hydrophobic molecules tend to form spheres in aquous media. After, we were able to introduce the concept of exosomes and the reason they have spheric shapes.
We performed a banana nucleic acid extraction to be able to explain what we understand as genetic material. Thus, we were able to talk about what our exosomes carry: RNA.
In this chapter, we wanted to highlight one of the main characteristics of exosomes: its specificty towards their target tissue. To do so, we imagined a labyrinth model, where, even though the exosomes come across several different cell types, there is only one right cell type, an only path that leads to the exit of the labyrinth.
We ended our series of chapters introducing one of the main goal of our project: boosting exosome production. As we had already talked about exosomes and RNA, we went directly focused on the concept of boosting an experiment. Hence, we used bread making to exemplify the importance of using the most idoneal booster, in this case, baker's yeast. We compared different potential boosters and chose the most idoneal, following the same way of reasoning that we do in a lab to choose the ideal sequence to introduce inside the plasmid and boost exosome production.
SPEECHES IN SCHOOLS
Over the past few months we have had the opportunity to give talks in some of the schools where we ourselves grew up. We could introduce them to iGEM, explain our project in a more friendly way and talk to them about the different careers and opportunities in science. We believe that it is very important to have references from a young age, and we have taken advantage of these spaces to encourage the youngest children to take an interest in science. In this way they will hopefully be more aware of the scientific research, be aware of its applications and take an interest in it.
In June, we had the opportunity to present our project to the students of Institut Escola Sant Jordi, in Vilassar de Dalt. There, we were able to explain what is synthetic biology and what it can be used for, as well as talking specifically about our project.
