Synthetic biology uses principles to re-envision the potential of biological systems, with applications ranging from therapeutics to agriculture. It is a relatively new field with enormous potential, and as young researchers working in the field, we consider it our responsibility to communicate the beauty of synthetic biology to the public. Interacting with our stakeholders helped us realise how science can inspire people and the central role that science communication plays in bridging the gap between academia and the general public. To do this, we first established a set of goals that we would like to achieve through our initiative, and these include:
Our team made use of the
Our approach
5Ws in Science Communication
Who are our stakeholders?
The intended audience consists of various stakeholders. We made a conscious effort in order to cater to a diverse audience pool of children as well as adults of different age groups including people with varied educational backgrounds and different native languages. We also uploaded our presentations and videos on social media channels in order to be globally accessible.
When was it conducted?
We made sure that the academic schedules of the students were taken into consideration when planning all our events. We also wanted to celebrate science on special days by planning our events centred around the theme. (For eg. Celebrating National Science Day)
What are we communicating?
Careful consideration was given to the needs of our target audience in the creation of all of our educational materials. We made sure to design our content keeping in mind the prerequisite knowledge required for it. In order to make our materials more accessible to readers outside of STEM , we have simplified the language used and provided clear definitions for all the scientific terms. To reach the widest possible audience, we also incorporated a number of mediums of communication such as art and music.
Why is this knowledge important to be imparted?
It's important for us researchers to explain genetic engineering and synthetic biology to the public in order to reduce the stigma associated with using GMOs and inspire the next generation to use synthetic biology to solve real-world problems. The production of vaccines is a well-known benefit of modifying organisms. Our educational materials have highlighted such lifesaving applications and current advances of the field. During our interactions with our target audience, we learned the needs of different educational tools and improvised our sessions and created handbooks on their feedback.
Which platforms have we used?
All of the events were either held online or in person, depending upon the convenience of the hosts and attendees. Online events provided us with a platform to reach out to a global audience and facilitated us to host some of the pioneers in the field. We also organised classroom sessions for students in our community and shared educational materials with nearby schools.
We have conducted various events to communicate science and synthetic biology through art, music and literature. We have also shed light on some of the historical advancements in the field of science.
To kickstart our series of events that showcase science through art, we conducted Kalakrithi, on April 15th to celebrate World Art Day. Our aim was to inspire kids to envision the science around them through art. Our target audience were children from classes 1 to 12. We wanted their creative take on the science involved in everyday life.
We carefully selected the topics according to the age groups.
| Target Audience | Theme | Our Motive |
|---|---|---|
| 6-8 years of age | Nature | To observe the beauty of nature and learn how to appreciate it through art. |
| 9-12 years of age | Science and technology in 2050 | We wanted them to imagine their future world by drawing inspiration from the advances in science and technology. |
| 13-16 years of age | Life of a scientist | As these students are on the brink of graduation, we wanted to see how students perceive the life of a scientist and encourage them to explore careers in STEM. |
For more details click here.
The students were given complete freedom to choose their art medium, and prior permission was taken to post their artwork on social media handles. We received a total of 51 entries from all over India. We also asked the kids to provide descriptions of their artwork to gauge their understanding and motive. Participation certificates were given to all the participants, and the winners received cash prizes.
All the winning entries in this PDF that was sent to all the participants can be found here
Silde 1. Kalakrithi poster Silde 2,3 & 4. Winning entries of the competition
Hence to bring forth our life as iGEMers working with bacteria, our team, in collaboration with iGEM IISER Tirupati, present SynVibe, a musical that celebrates the monotonous routines in the lab with microorganisms, full of reading papers and repeating experiments. It was a challenging piece of work to incorporate our "own" story through the medium of song lyrics, direct the scenes, and choreograph the fun part of being a scientist.Two extremely well-known songs, Dance monkey and I don't care served as the basic tracks for our synbio parody.
The video for the song is available here and the song lyrics are available here.
Silde 1. Thumbnail of the YouTube video for syn-vibe Silde 2. Both our team members dancing to the song’s vibe in the video Silde 3. Feedback from the audience
A traditional Japanese haiku is a three-line poem that has a total of seventeen syllables and is written with a syllable count that alternates between 5/7/5. The haiku poetic form is known for its focus on nature imagery and emphasis on minimalism, intensity, and clarity. We encouraged students to use figurative language to capture the spirit of the biology lab, where fascinating investigations into nature's mysteries are conducted. Thus, we held a competition called BIOKU - online haiku competition. The bioku competition's theme was "In the Biology lab," and its target audience was college students. To get everyone in the mood for writing haikus, we started our contest with our event poster having a haiku in it! Here are the winning submissions:
Silde 1. Bioku Poster Silde 2. Winning Entries
Most of us have never thought about the number of iterations everyday lab instruments such as pipettes or centrifuges have gone through to result in their current functional forms. To help us realise their role in the progress of science and appreciate the exceptional advancements in the instrument we use today, we present a series of videos, "The Evolution of Lab Instruments", highlighting some myriad of designs, through the decades, for each seemingly straightforward instrument and the brilliant minds behind them. Through these illustrative videos, we provided an overview of the development of three pieces of laboratory gear: the pipette, the microscope, and the ultracentrifuge. To connect with our online audience, the format of reels was chosen and through beautiful illustrations and fascinating facts, we were able to gain over 5000 views for the series.
The links for the reels are available here:
Biosafety has become more important as a means of safeguarding both the public and nature's safety in light of recent advances in biotechnology and genetic engineering. It is fundamental that each and every researcher should be aware of the guidelines, regulations, and organisations responsible for the oversight. We have come up with innovative ways to communicate to the general public, especially to researchers, the various aspects of biosafety.
There is a lack of understanding of safety organisations, their missions, and potential threats. Without being aware of the potential hazards involved with research, as well as the organisations' policies in place to handle such situations, it is impossible to be responsible researchers. To do so, we envisaged an event where we could present synthetic biology, the potential misuse of synbio and existing biosafety organisations and protocols in place through a murder mystery, Synbio CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). This discord-based online event is centred around solving a murder case with synthetic biology and biosafety as the backdrop. The hidden riddles and storyline were inspired by synbio and biosafety approaches, respectively.
As a genre, murder mysteries are unparalleled in their ability to keep the reader's attention. One of the reasons for its success is that, rather than offering an entertainment experience, this genre requires you to employ your own cleverness when you consume media actively. Adapting murder mystery techniques to instructional design may make learning more interesting. So, we asked students to put on detective hats, get magnifying glasses, and actively participate. Read more.
By referencing probable misuses of synthetic biology, various real-life instances, some of which we have described here, and developing fictional scenarios around them, the world-building was kept as realistic as possible. We also referred to and centred the tale around organisations committed to safety and their efforts toward biosafety and accountability, such as the Biological Weapons Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Cartagena Protocol.
Without giving too much away, the story takes place during the fictional 10th Biological Weapons Convention review meeting. Against this backdrop, the participants will have to follow up on an anonymous tip about an artefact that threatens the convention and everyone present. takes them on a wild goose chase across labs and locales, with multiple murders interspersed with various facets of safety and safety hazards. The story and puzzle were divided into four acts that the teams had to complete. The participants' ultimate purpose was to figure out what had happened, why the conference was in peril, and who could have been the main culprit.
Plot details are attatched here.
Results:
The teams jumped to try and guess the story from the first act, but they were slowed down by the puzzles that drew away their time and attention for which they had to develop an understanding about DNA digital storage and genetic circuits. The entire plot also highlighted how the characters of the story care about safety and how it impacts the consequences within the story. The teams were quite fervent with solving the mystery and even took more than the stipulated time to get to the bottom of the story. Some of the team results are attached here.
Feedbacks:
The teams were surprised with the amount of material that was available to them, as they expected it be a much simpler murder mystery. By taking a look at their answer reports and looking at their discussions, we were quite enthused that some of the teams were able to figure out the synbio logic behind the puzzles and the story points, filled with safety. It was rewarding to see them pick up some new information while having a good time at the event.
Feedback from the participants in Discord channel
Another aspect of biosafety is to follow proper waste segregation procedures in the lab. Every day, a lot of biological waste is generated in our laboratories. The fact that our campus is located in the foothills of the Western Ghats must direct our attention to how we handle the disposal of laboratory waste. What happened to the waste after segregation? Is it being safely managed and disposed of? To answer all these questions, we conducted in-depth research and a number of interviews with individuals involved in the biological waste management system. Read more.
A survey was taken to understand the awareness of biological waste management among our institute students. We got to know from the survey results that most of them vaguely had an idea about what happens after the disposal of waste, and more than 60% of the students have not heard of the biomedical waste management facility IMAGE (Indian Medical Association Goes Eco-Friendly) that is responsible for safe biological and biomedical waste disposal. Hence, in response to this survey, we decided to make a short documentary film, “Track you Biowaste”, where we tracked a pipette from our biology laboratory to its final destination where it was segregated and disposed of.
We screened our documentary film for all students on the occasion of the Swachhata Pakhwada observed by the Government of India's Ministry of Education in all educational institutions from September 1st to the 15th, 2022. Swachhata Pakhwada(Cleanliness for 15 days) is an initiative of 15 days of different activities for the Clean India Mission. This year’s theme of Swachhata Pakhwada was cleanliness on the campus, and hence our screening was perfect for the occasion. There was a mix of the student audience, from undergraduate to graduate students.
Slide 1.Survey on Awareness among our institute researchers about BioWaste Management Slide 2.Documentary film screening in the Seminar Hall
You can find the pdf document detailing all of our findings throughout the course of our journey following the waste produced by our institute in the HP Section and the documentary film on the Education page.
On days recognised to honour the contributions of scientists and the discoveries they've made, we've come up with a number of activities for reaching out to public about the importance of science and the work of some of history's most brilliant minds, particularly in the field of biological sciences.
Timeline of Events
We launched our project on World Cancer Day by hosting a fun Google Forms quiz competition called UNRAVEL. The riddles were based on cancer terms, and the goal was to familiarise people with them. We also asked them to take note of the code number that appeared alongside each question, and the final question included the password 4222, which stood for February 4, 22 - World Cancer Day. After the participant successfully completed all of the riddles, the final page contained information about World Cancer Day and a brief preview of our project. We received over 80 responses. The quiz was a huge hit, and we publicised all the winners on our social media channels. The comments below are examples of the ones received.
The last informational page of the form revealed for those who successfully solved all the riddles along with some feedback of the participants
We created a reel highlighting the women scientists in biology and their specialised fields to commemorate International Day of Women and Girls in Science. We shared this reel and published a short quiz as an Instagram story series in which we revealed a picture of one of the scientists in the reel and asked them to Guess the Scientist. We then shared the scientists' information on our Instagram accounts the following day. That reel received more than 7000 views on Instagram. Check out our reel here.
Story Series on Famous Women Scientists in the field of Biology
We had an amazing team-building event to celebrate World DNA Day, with all of our members creating their own DNA helix origami. We all made long strands of DNA and enjoyed doing some art and craft outside the lab with our hands instead of gloves and tips. We also created a short tutorial on how to make your own DNA origami so that everyone could try it out. On World DNA Day, we shared the video on our social media accounts. Our Instagram video received over 2,000 views. Check out our reel here.
Team Building Event - Making DNA Origami and the video tutorial
On the occasion of National Science Day, we put together a video with unused lab tips and tubes to spell out "Happy Science Day." We had a great time creating this video. Here we have more than 3000 views of the video on Instagram. Check out our reel here.
“Happy Science Day” Words made from old unused lab supplie
On World Art day, we held Kalakrithi, an all-India art competition for students in grades 1 through 12 to appreciate science via art. We received over fifty responses from across India. Read the Kalakrithi section for more details.
On the occasion of World Environmental day, we collaborated with iGEM Vilnius, who came up with an instagram post appreciating the water bodies in our surroundings. Read the Collaboration page for more details.
On the occasion of the International day of the world’s Indigenous People, we collaborated with the Queens iGEM team and made an instagram story honouring Dr. G N Ramachandran, an eminent scientist from India who developed the Ramachandran plot analyse the spectrum of protein conformations, which remains one of the most significant contributions to the field of structural biology. Read the Collaboration page for more details.
An Instagram story series featuring the kids' imaginative microbes with superpowers from our SCI-BIO online camp was created in honour of World Microbiome Day. We were amazed to find that most of their superpower microbes are the very ones that synthetic biologists like ourselves are working to create by manipulating the microbial machinery. A bacteria that feeds on fungi is one such organism. At a deeper level of analysis, the goal of this superpower is to develop a bacteria that is effective against fungal infections. This was in fact the goal of the previous iGEM team 2021 from our institute. To combat fungal infection, they sought to cultivate bacteria capable of producing recombinant antifungal chitinase.
In India, breast cancer is rapidly becoming one of the leading causes of both morbidity and mortality. The lack of awareness regarding breast cancer, the inaccessibility of health care facilities, and the stigma that is attached to the cancer have all led to underdiagnosis and undertreatment. Detection of cancer at an early stage is very important for a higher chance of complete treatment. Since people of all ages and gender have the risk of being susceptible to breast cancer, we identified our stakeholders and created breast cancer awareness through a wide variety of communication strategies.
We revealed our project idea to work on breast cancer on World Cancer Day by hosting a fun Google Forms quiz competition called UNRAVEL. With over 80 participants, our quiz with riddles serves to introduce several terms associated with cancer to the common public. Extending this, we wanted to present the ideation and design of our project to the student community of our campus. We organised “Meet Team iGEM’22 - Project Reveal” an offline meet-up for us to finally unravel our project for the year in a highly interactive session.
We invited the entire student community and faculty members to the event via social media posts and personal invitations, providing a batch-by-batch brief introduction to iGEM and the event. Our members visited the maths, physics, chemistry and biology classes to spread the word about iGEM and invite the students to the session. We also made posters and put them up throughout our campus. We also created a fun promo event, where we requested the students to spot our posters and take selfies and story it. Read more.
With more than 100 people attending the event, all the members of the team individually introduced different aspects of our iGEM project. Through the use of the Mentee-mentor website, we were also able to engage in two-way communication with our target audience to determine which social media platform is most suitable for effective science education and communication, and it turned out to be Instagram, followed by Youtube.
We also gave our audience an exclusive chance to name our mascot Omivon. Omivon before getting its name, was a gender-neutral mascot of our project Duonco. Its dual colours represents the two different types of vesicles that we are developing to have increased specificity towards cancer cells. The students came up with great suggestions incorporating our project idea and cancer. Taking inspiration from this, we decided on “Omivon” originating from the star of our project, Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMVs).
Find our Project Reveal presentation here, which gives a basic overview of iGEM and its various aspects, along with a short introduction to our project idea.
Further, we also got a chance to showcase our project idea on a display board located in our biology department. This enabled us to reach out to the people who were unable to attend the project reveal. Anyone who enters the building will have a chance to look at our project idea through the display board.
We also made use of a self-explanatory animation video to convey our project idea.
Slide 1.Promotion of our Project Reveal Slide 2.Results of the poll Slide 3.Snippets from the Project Reveal Slide 4.Display of our our Project Overview
Our team members who volunteered for a breast cancer screening camp conducted in Chathancode, Kerala in 2021 realised that in our small community of Vithura (with a population of 20,000), the number of breast cancer cases was alarming, and there's an urgent need of awareness and screening drive to identify the cases and provide early treatment. We then went forward to conduct an awareness and screening drive on our campus itself. We decided to cater our session for the housekeeping staff of our institute, as we realised from our survey that they lacked the awareness and the resources for regular screening sessions. The majority of our institute housekeeping staff are women over the age of 30 years and hence fall under the high risk category of breast cancer. With the help of the medical officer of our institute Dr Hema Francis, we conducted a Breast Cancer Awareness and Screening Camp for all the housekeeping staff of our campus. Read more.
To gather all 150 housekeeping staff at the same time, we approached our institute management who were very supportive of our initiative as this was the first time ever an activity dedicated to the housekeeping staff was conducted. We encouraged the staff to participate in the camp by distributing event pamphlets in the native language Malayalam and sending mass messages to all of them inviting them to attend the camp.
The Breast Cancer Awareness and Screening Camp was inaugurated by our chief guest Dr. Kavitha Ravi, National Secretary, Indian Medical Association (IMA) Women Doctors Wing. Following the inauguration, Dr, Hema Francis conducted breast cancer awareness sessions with the use of slides with information in Malayalam for all the staff present there. We also distributed awareness pamphlets that were translated to Malayalam.
Slide 1&2. The Invitation pamphlet in both native language Malayalam and English(the blue dress in the illustration represent the uniform dress colour of our housekeeping staff) Slide 3. Snippets from awareness session
After communicating with people within our institute community, we took our communication one step further by interviewing a diverse set of people from different parts of India through a public interview series. We got to communicate and assess the level of awareness of different people from various age groups, genders, professional backgrounds etc. We primarily asked them three questions:
The responses to these questions brought to our notice that people may not be aware of self breast examinations, whether they fall into the age classified risk group for breast cancer, men being affected with breast cancer. We, therefore, distributed our awareness pamphlets and discussed with them some of the common myths about breast cancer. They were very appreciative of our attempt in creating the pamphlet for their awareness. For more details check the Human Practices page.
Our goal is to initiate a breast cancer awareness campaign to spread awareness without any age, gender, or language constraints. But in order to overcome the ignorance of people as shown by the survey and interview series in Human Practices, adopting an innovative approach is imperative. Theatre - being one of the greatest platforms for creating social awareness became the perfect media for us to spread our message.
Hence our team collaborated with Theatrics Society of our institute to present “Let's fight with Courage”, - A breast cancer awareness drama focusing on self-breast examination. The drama was orchestrated in the vernacular language of Malayalam. The posters used as props were also translated into Malayalam for better reach.
The Mall of Travancore, one of the biggest malls in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the state, was supportive of our campaign and provided us with a stage for orchestrating our drama. Through this event, we were able to captivate a wide range of audiences to join our campaign. After the drama, we distributed our awareness pamphlets and had great discussions regarding the same with some of the people present there.
Find the video of our entire drama staged at the Mall of Travancore here.
Explaining the steps of Self-breast examination and distributing pamphlets
October is celebrated as the breast cancer awareness month, hence is very special to our hearts. The whole world indulges in organising various events to spread awareness and raise funds for breast cancer treatment and research.
A talk series aimed to create awareness was, according to us, an event best suited for the month of October. We initiated a collaboration to bring together all the iGEM teams working on women's health-related projects on this special occasion. We present ‘We-Talk’, a collaborative event organised by four iGEM teams from across India: IISER Thiruvananthapuram, IISER Tirupati, IISER Berhampur and IIT Roorkee targeting a wide range of audience from students to the general public.
We-Talk
| iGEM Team | Schedule | Event | Topic |
|---|---|---|---|
| IISER ThiruvananthapuramWorking on developing a novel drug delivery system for breast cancer) | Pre-Recording | Interview with Dr. Manjiri Bakre, CEO and Founder of OncoStem Diagnostics | Development of Oncostem and her experience as a women entrepreneur. |
| IISER Tirupati(Working on developing a novel aptamer-based diagnostic kit for PCOS) | 1st October | Interactive Quiz to communicate more about STEM women who contributed to women's health improvement. | Let's celebrate Women in STEM |
| IISER Berhampur(Developing a platform at the point-of-care for the detection of uropathogenic bacteria) | 2nd October | Talk: Dr. Indira Palo, Gynaecologist & Obstetrician | Menstrual Hygiene and Challenges in Adolescent Girls |
| IIT Roorkee(Developing a fast and efficient detection kit for cervical cancer) | 2nd October | Talk: Dr Prerna Lakhwani, Senior Gynecologic Oncologist | Cervical Cancer & Breast Cancer |
On the occasion of breast cancer awareness month, we also got a chance to interview the CEO and Co-Founder of Niramai Health Analytics, Dr. Geetha Manjunath. Their team has developed a novel software-based medical device to detect breast cancer at a much earlier stage than traditional methods or self-examination. Their solution is a low-cost, accurate, automated, portable cancer screening tool that can be operated in any clinic. She was very inspiring, and we had an insightful conversation with her.
Here’s a snippet of our interview!
We have uploaded the interview with Dr. Manjiri Bakre and Dr. Geetha Manjunath to youtube to reach out to the wider audience. Find the link to our interview series here.
Did we reach out to all our stakeholders?
The promo video for our project is the first official introduction of the ideation, design and execution of our project to the public. Our project video was directed and shot in a manner that draws attention to the seriousness of the problem statement and our rationale behind working on breast cancer now. We gave statistical information on the rise of breast cancer cases, followed by drawbacks of existing therapies and the novelty of our project. We concluded with an overview of the events that we have conducted to improve breast cancer awareness.
Please find the link to our project video in the Home page
The student magazine of IISER Thiruvananthapuram, Sopanam, actively works toward presenting an overview of activities happening on campus every month through their series, Campus Chronicles. We were featured in their March and August editions, and the following events that were conducted were highlighted:
We have also reached out to Indian digital news platform, The News Minute to put out an article about iGEM and our project. The article is currently under review and we hope to see it out soon.
Our events featured in Campus Chronicles by Sopanam
The results of the poll taken during Meet Team’22 - Project Reveal event, helped us focus our majority science and project communication through Instagram.
We presented a series of social media posts detailing the history of synthetic biology and its recent developments. Our brief overview covered the basics of synthetic biology, including its definition and the early scientific breakthroughs that paved the way for its development. Followed by the latest synthetic biology techniques and their uses in biopharmaceuticals and biosensors, we also explained the various drug delivery systems currently in use.
The evolution of synthetic biology, its recent developments and Existing Drug Delivery systems
Using the split image method, we introduced the six components that are integral to the design of our drug delivery system. The user visiting our page would instantly get an overview of our project components.
Two engineered outer membrane vesicles with Affibodies and tumour homing peptide
Utilising social media to spread awareness of breast cancer by creating a platform for sharing related events and providing facts and data in a consumable way engages an audience by helping them understand. Our posts on Instagram gave an overview of the seriousness of breast cancer and the different molecular subtypes that are present, as well as promoting awareness regarding breastfeeding.
Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign on social media.
Slide 1.Guess the scientist (celebrating International women and girls in science) Slide 2.>Price Tags (To enable the audience to understand the huge amount of monetary investment behind the utility of lab equipment) Slide 3.Promote A biologist’s mother day song by Adam Cole on World Mother’s Day
Here’s a Statistical analysis of our communication through different social media platforms.
Educating the younger generation about the importance of synthetic biology and communicating science to the general public is very important. Here’s a compilation of all our education and communication activities and how they have helped us bridge the gap between the scientific community and the general public.
Kappel, K., & Holmen, S. J. (1AD, January 1). Why science communication, and does it work? A taxonomy of science communication aims and a survey of empirical evidence. Frontiers. Retrieved October 4, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00055
