Faculty Day at the Institute for Biology - University of Freiburg

The faculty day takes place annually at the faculty of biology in Freiburg and allows for a creative exchange between the various working groups, students and professors. The event consists of informative lectures and even constructive discussions between participants, but also offers fun activities and games.
At this year's faculty day, we got the opportunity to present our project to an audience interested in different fields of biology. Professors, students as well as external visitors gave us their attention for our presentation and a fruitful discussion afterwards. However, we realised that many of the students had never heard anything about synthetic biology before, so this was a great opportunity to spread awareness for synthetic biology right at the doorstep of our own university. The many inquiries about our project and the great interest in synthetic biology coming not only from the students but also from other visitors inspired us to explore other opportunities to communicate synthetic biology to more people.

Open door day of the Signalling Research Centres BIOSS and CIBSS

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The CIBSS is a cluster of excellence at the University of Freiburg where researchers are dedicated to understanding the biological language that orchestrates multicellular life in humans, animals and plants. Also, our iGEM lab is housed in the same building, so we were thrilled when we heard about the open door day organised by CIBSS, and thought it would be a great opportunity for us to do what we wanted to do: educate the public, bring research to the streets and show our neighbourhood what is going on inside the research buildings they pass by every day.

The open day consists of lectures by various research groups, experiments to participate in and many other scientific offers. The goal of the open day is to show local people from different backgrounds, which may not have anything to do with biology, what the people working there are doing and why it could be important to them. As part of the CIBSS open day, we presented our system, CELLECT, and the field of synthetic biology to interested visitors from the local community in the format of a short lecture. Afterwards, we sought direct conversation with the audience and created space for questions. Many asked us “how is it possible to change the DNA of bacteria?” or “how does the Riboswich detect the product?”, questions that may seem self-evident to well established scientists, which however can be puzzling for someone who has never gotten the chance to get in touch with synthetic biology. Understanding these basic concepts is essential to bring synthetic biology closer to local people, and is often already enough to spark interest and a new way of thinking in our discussion partners. Questions like these encourage us to find ways to explain complex biological processes in a way that are easy to understand, even for biology novices. This helped us a lot in carrying out the following work with other activities we had planned.

Throughout this whole day, we also noticed that the children attending enjoyed the practical experiences a lot, while the adults were interested in learning more on synthetic biology and its noumerous applications. Since we wanted to further specialise our next activities to fit the needs and interests of our target groups, the open day posed a perfect “playtest” to explore what kind of science communication worked for which group of people.

Südbaden TV

In order to reach a wide range of people, we decided to bring synthetic biology into local television. Südbaden TV is a television station that broadcasts a wide range of regional events. This includes political and cultural events, sports, but also news in science. It reaches a daily audience of about 1.4 million and is especially popular in elderly viewers.

We had the great opportunity to be interviewed, where we explained "CELLECT" in a way that is understandable to people with no prior knowledge. It has been challenging for us to describe our whole project in only a few minutes, but we also learned that brevity and concise presentation of key findings, ideas and innovations are crucial for good communication that is interesting and informative the whole way through. If you are interested you can watch our interview right here!
After that, we sought out ways to reach younger people. After all, high-school-students represent the synthetic biologists of tomorrow! We were therefore delighted to find two different schools excited to cooperate with us.

Droste-Hülshoff-Gymnasium

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In the Droste-Hülshoff-Gymnasium in Freiburg we were given the opportunity to conduct a biology lesson for the graduating class consisting of students between 17 and 19 years of age. The curriculum of the highschool mainly focuses on content relevant to the graduation exams. Other topics are only roughly addressed or even omitted altogether. Biological research, for example, is hardly ever discussed. This is exactly what we wanted to change during our visit and therefore decided not only to take a closer look at our research area of synthetic biology, but also to address other research areas.

We split our visit into two parts. The first part was theoretical and the second part practical. For the theoretical part we presented different fields of research in biology with a focus on synthetic biology. However, we also included neurobiology, plant physiology, tumour biology and cell biology to present possible reasearch fields with methods used in synthetic biology. Afterwards, we explained our project „CELLECT“ and answered upcoming questions. We extensively discussed the different parts of our project and the sustainability and the effectiveness of our system.

To give the students some first hand experience with research and laboratory work, we decided to include a practical part consisting of DNA extraction of bananas and oral mucosa. The experiments should be performed as research-like as possible. Therefore, we decided to conduct them in the following way: We handed out a protocol, describing the experimental setup and different steps of the experiment, allowing the students to work independently. Through this simple experiment, we tried to bring the laboratory into the classroom as much as possible and make research tangible for the students. After the experiment we talked about the biological background of the experiment and discussed the mechanisms behind DNA extraction. The feedback from both, teacher and students, was very affirmative and the teacher announced her wish to integrate our experiments into her lessons next year, so we provided her with everything required for this.

Community College - Volkshochschule

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To reach yet another group of young adults, we talked to the community college in Rheinfelden that allows people to catch up on their highschool degree during evening courses. The reasons why people choose this type of school to achieve their degree vary from person to person. Some are parents and have to take care of their children during daytime, others have already completed vocational training, work during the day and go to school in the evening in order to continue or expand their education.

There, we first presented the fundamentals of synthetic biology to a graduating class of 15 students between the ages of twenty and thrithy. To show the importance of synthetic biology, we discussed its presence in our daily lives, often even without us noticing. We also looked into innovations like insulin production in yeast (which came to replace animal-derived alternatives), and the „Golden Rice“ project, which involved researchers from the University of Freiburg and aimed to increase vitamin A accessability in malnourished populations.
After the students understood the essential concepts of synthetic biology, we explained our ideas and plans regarding our self regulatory system CELLECT. We had lots of interesting discussions with the students and had the impression they enjoyed our session just as much as we did!

All in all, the feedback was very positive and a few weeks after our visit, we again had a call with the biology teacher at the evening school. In the meantime he had spoken to his students about our visit and was able to give us both his and the students' impression of our visit. He mentioned that it was helpful to bring in external people who are interested in biology and have a more in-depth knowledge of a certain subject area. He also added he would "repeat the cooperation with us at any time". For the next time, however, we should explain the individual basics more precisely and at a slower pace, according to him. This was some valuable feedback we could implement into our next outreach activities.

Reflections on our initial intention for our Education project

While reflecting on our goal to communicate synthetic biology to the broad and diverse public, we noticed that all the groups of people we have addressed so far already have relatively good access to education. Unfortunately, even though Germany is trying to make progress in this regard, the parents’ education can still heavily influence the educational path of their children. In Germany, 80% of all children with parents that have an academic degree, also attend a university during their educational career. For children of non-academic families, it is only 27% [1]. A huge difference.
Therfore we wanted to dig deeper into ways to enable children with academic freedom, beeing able to choose ones degree free of socioeconomic status or the general environment of a person growing up. We were quickly recommended to contact a facility that allowed us to work with children that encountered a lot of hurdles, already in their early lives.

MAKS

Model Project working with Children of People with Addiction Disorders

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We reached out to MAKS (Modellprojekt Arbeit mit Kindern von Suchtkranken/ Model project working with children of people with addiction disorders), an association based in Freiburg, that supports children with a family history of substance abuse and addiction. 2.5 Million children below the age of 18 live in a family with at least one parent suffering from addiction [2]. Some of these children may not receive the support they need at home. Living under such circumstances during the fragile stages of development can have a plethora of effects on a child's wellbeing, identity, emotional behaviour and education. As an example, these children often face a higher risk of developing addictive behaviours and mental illnesses as well. The likelihood of this naturally varies from child to child, but is generally higher than for ones with two healthy parents. To support children from such backgrounds, the MAKS facility was opened. MAKS is a place where children receive the support they might need from trained social workers as well as volunteers. The kids always have a contact person for their worries, but they can also just play games, paint or learn.
On two afternoons we had the opportunity to teach children between the ages of 10 and 14 years about synthetic biology and its potential. Our main goal was to inspire children and to show them one of many interesting paths one can take in the future.

First we explained the basics about DNA such as genetic relationships, manipulation of DNA, and outlined the possibilities of DNA extraction/sequencing. As children learn in different ways, we tried to create a dynamic and multifaceted biology session together with our audience. Our presentation and the subsequent discussion was backed up with a lot of visual impressions that helped to not only convey information, but also encourage the children to ask questions, come up with new ideas or simply fantasise about the possibilities of aynthetic biology. Other children on the other hand find it easiest to consolidate their new knowledge by directly applying what they have learned. Therefore we made sure to also add a practical part that illustrates what we have explained in a playful manner! We extracted the DNA of oral mucosa with a kit sponsored by Bio-Rad Laboratories. The extracted DNA can afterwards be transferred into a necklace to store and present their very own DNA. They could also choose to colour their extracted DNA using coloured ethanol to give their DNA necklaces a dash of colour. While waiting for some of the extraction steps the children did a DNA-puzzle which further illustrated the genetic similarities and differences between different species, like monkeys, humans or rats. We have developed this DNA puzzle and 3D printed it so that the children could arrange different DNA-strands in the order of genetic relatedness of different species by checking how many base pairs fitted together complementary. Find an instruction for directly downloading the 3D-template to print it yourself: here

We received very positive feedback which further intensified our wish to make synthetic biology more accessible for everyone. We were very happy to hear that an employee of MAKS told us that: „it was very cool that you organised such a program and the feedback was great. The kids were super enthusiastic and very interested, come back next year, the kids would be very happy.“

All in all we had wonderful discussions, lectures and a great experience while getting involved into the discourse surrounding synthetic biology. We hope to have sparked some enthusiasm in both young and old as well as created some new perspectives and ideas, allowing people to look at synthetic biology with a fresh pair of eyes!