Education

Some members of the StarchLight team had scientific vulgarization classes with two members of the association L’exploratoire which does 99 seconds podcasts on science for a broad audience. The StarchLight team thought that it could be interesting to collaborate with them by realizing a podcast and popularizing the project. L'exploratoire, especially Mrs Natacha Janiszewski and Mr Terence Saunier, helped us by making comments and giving us advice on our way to write a popularized script. Mrs Natasha Janiszewski did the illustration parts of the podcast.

Our team would like to thank L’exploratoire team for helping us doing this podcast accessible to all audiences.

With the help of a social sciences teacher of our school, Mrs Ida Bost, the StarchLight team found a teacher from a local elementary school, Paul Langevin school, who was interested in organizing science workshops to teach kids about electricity. Some of StarchLight team members carried out three different experiments organized as two sessions of one hour. For each session, a recap was done on the previous session to improve the understanding of the previous session.

Linked to our project, StarchLight decided to do workshops on electricity and potential sources of energy as starch.

A zinc nail and a copper coin are put in each potato. Then, the nail of the first potato is connected to the coin of the second potato with an electric wire. This step was repeated with the other potatoes. The potatoes are connected to each other in a circuit. The first potato and the last potato are connected to the LED lamp which should be turned on.

However, this experiment did not work because we did not have enough potatoes to turn on a LED lamp. It was interesting to explain to them that in science every experiment does not work everytime at first sight. Nevertheless, we showed them that electricity was generated with a multimeter.

First, the lemon is cut in half. Then, a copper blade and a zinc blade are inserted in the lemon with less than 1cm of distance. The positive terminal of the multimeter is connected with the copper blade which will be the positive pole of the battery. Next, it is necessary to connect the negative terminal of the multimeter on the zinc blade which will be the negative pole of the battery. The voltage is then generated and can be observed on the multimeter.

We thought that it could be interesting to organize a Symposium on synthetic biology for second year students of Sup’Biotech. We found three keynote speakers: Mr François Kepes, Mr Matthieu Da Costa, Mrs Naomi Kaminsky and planified this symposium on the 21th of September.

Concerning the conduct of this Symposium, our team first started by doing a short presentation on synthetic biology and our project. Then, Mr Matthieu Da talked about enzyme engineering and its use in synthetic biology by presenting ABOLIS, the company where he works at Lead Biochemist.

Mrs Naomi Kaminsky, the co-founder, scientific director of STH BIOTECH, presented synthetic biology applied to plants and their industrial applications. STH BIOTECH is a start-up developing an innovative method to produce active principles based on cannabis.

Finally, Mr François Képès, member of the French academy of agriculture and technologies academy, talked about the storage of metadata in the DNA.

Our team has the chance to be invited to participate in the BioSynSys symposium from the 12th of September to the 14th of September, approaching diverse subjects around synthetic biology applied to molecular hardware. We had the pleasure of assisting to talks from researchers working on various cutting edge technologies in the field.

Furthermore, they had also planned an iGEM workshop where multiple French iGEM teams got the opportunity to present their project in front of the researchers present. This was a great exercise to get used to presenting in front of a larger audience, and we got practical questions about our project that gave us ideas on how to improve our project and obtain our proof of concept, especially about the treatment of the brewer's spent grain and for our modeling efforts.

During this event, we collaborated with the other Parisian teams by animating workshops. It took place on the 8th and 9th of October. We realized different stands with a different target audience. First, we did a stand with micropipettes to teach how to use it by using dyes and 96 well plates. For younger children, we showed them how a Pasteur pipette works and helped them to mix the different dyes at disposition to make different colors. For older ones, we taught them how to use a micropipette and how to do a serial dilution.

Then, we organized sessions that first started with DNA extractions from onions showing to the public directly with the unaided eye the DNA extracted. DNA was extracted with salt, dishwashing liquid and ethanol. And then, they observe at a microscope of onion cells, algae cells of the iGEM Sorbonne and Streptomyces of the iGEM GO Paris-Saclay.

This event permitted us to adapt our speech to the audience. It was a good practice for doing scientific mediation.