Abstract

Synthetic biology is a very complex subject area in the life sciences. For many children and also adults it is difficult to imagine how interdisciplinary this field is. To make this more understandable, we have launched information events and Instagram campaigns. Our goal is to educate a range of potential individuals about the possibilities of synthetic biology. With our different campaigns we have addressed a wide range of different groups of people. In addition to young students, discussions were also held with representatives of politics.

#MemeMonday, #TechniqueThursday and #ScienceSaturday

To make the complex field of synthetic biology easier to understand, we have created special Instagram #hashtags. In order to get an impression of which techniques are possible with synthetic biology, the #TechniqueThursday was created. Methods that could be relevant for the iGEM competition were presented here. Among other things, various PCR methods were presented here, as well as the most varied sequencing techniques. #TechniqueThursday

In order to reach a young group of potential scientists, the so-called #MemeMonday was created in addition to the #TechniqueThursday. Every Monday, a meme related to the life sciences appeared here. With these memes we showed how funny lab work and synthetic biology in general can be. #MemeMonday

In addition to communicate a broad spectrum of knowledge, the #ScienceSaturday was created here as well. This is where interesting papers were summarized and published on a multi-page Instagram post. These can help other iGEM teams in the future to find an interesting topic for their iGEM project. #ScienceSaturday

Visiting school

Many young students are still undecided about they future career, so we visited a biology high school course. Here we talked about many things, not only about synthetic biology in general, but also what is possible with modern technologies and what can be achieved with synthetic biology. So we talked about alternative energy sources and how they could be obtained with synthetic biology and about our project and how we use it to develop a more efficient test system and many other cool project ideas. To show the many facets of synthetic biology, we gave a presentation on synthetic biology.

Our presentation on synthetic biology particularly highlighted that many young students are interested in biology and its possibilities. The discussions we had showed how important such topics are in school and how neglected they are. To keep students interested we drew attention to our instagram campaign and how it explains complex methods and findings in a simple and straightforward way on a small instagram post.

Politician's visit

Since it is unimaginable to perform genetic engineering experiments in German classrooms, we talked to a German member of parliament about the possibilities of such technologies and problems in politics.

Together we discussed not only the potential of synthetic biology and such competitions, but also topics such as science communication or funding for such projects. In times of the corona pandemic, good communication between politics and science was very important. We talked about this in great detail during our conversation with the representative. This gave rise to some nice ideas on how to address certain target groups, such as schoolchildren or older people, to make good communication even better.

Article about the visit

BIOspektrum article

We published our project in an edition of the journal Biospektrum so that a large group of people can be informed about iGEM and its different projects. Biospektrum is a journal for the molecular life sciences in the German-speaking world. BioSpektrum works together with many societies in order to reach a broad audience of different scientific fields. With the article we were able to reach about 13,000 people, making them interested in the possibilities of our project.

Link to the article