This year our team has participated in several on-campus outreach events. During our team’s recruitment season we participated in our University’s “Clubs Days” event held on January 19th and 20th. Clubs Days is an event hosted by our university’s Student Association for undergraduate students to learn about all the clubs on campus and how to get involved. Here we met with many interested students and spoke about what our team does, what synthetic biology is using our project from last year (“Project Ceres”, a biopesticide) as an example and what the iGEM competition is.

Figure 1: Pictured is Dylan helping out with Clubs Days in January and sharing synthetic biology with the students at the University of Guelph!

Similarly, our club hosted a “Meet the Team” event on February 7th, for any students interested to learn more about our team. Many students attended this event and met the current executive team of iGEM Guelph and were able to learn more about the positions that we were currently recruiting for. Our team is a great experience for all students, and current exec members highly recommend joining! We asked for team members to share their experience of being a part of iGEM Guelph, and here’s what some of them said:

Much of our recruitment was done over our social media, specifically our Instagram, and we also posted team specific posters recruiting for engineers, wet lab and the business teams, throughout campus and degree specific buildings.

Figure 2-14: View our gallary for all our recruitment photos and content

In March, our team participated in College Royal weekend on campus. College Royal is a long time student and alumni tradition, dating back 99 years as of 2023. It is the largest-student run open house in all of North America, first hosted in 1924 and officially a tradition since 1925. Annually College Royal hosts over 20,000 visitors. To read more about College Royal and visit their official website, please visit https://www.collegeroyalsociety.com/.

This year iGEM Guelph participated in College Royal weekend for the first time ever. We hosted a DNA extraction booth with fruits and a DNA candy activity for kids. We had over 200 participants and as such, we have included our Candy DNA instructions below.

Over College Royal weekend we talked about our current project with over 600 parents, alumni and community members. In fact, one of the visitors was with the Guelph Legion Girl Guides where we hosted an event later in May for the SPARKS.

At College Royal weekend we educated the university community about synthetic biology and how iGEM Guelph uses synthetic biology. To further understand the community's background of basic biology concepts we included written questions that participants were able to answer and discuss with us.

Through this event, we participated in mutual dialogue about synthetic biology with hundreds of the university’s community members and even visitors that had traveled to come see College Royal!

Figure 15-19: College Royal fun moments and activities!

On campus, we organized two pre-orders for Giant Microbes, and both faculty and students generously contributed, aiding us in fundraising for our team. This initiative not only allowed us to gather nearly $500 for our team fund-raising efforts, but also served as a means to propagate scientific knowledge. Our primary offerings were bacteria, including E. coli, which we showcased at our College Royal booth to highlight our project's utilization of Escherichia coli. Furthermore, this fundraiser also helped promote awareness of our club as we gained more followers on Instagram, where we have all of our educational content about our club and synthetic biology.

Figure 20: Instagram posts of our microbe sale!

During the first week of September (September 3 at from 1-3 pm and Sept 9 at from 12-3 pm), our team hosted 2 Orientation week events.

Figure 21: Orientation Post

Orientation week (or o-week for short) is a week full of events hosted for the incoming first years at our University where clubs spread awareness of their club and some even have special prizes. Last year marked our team's first orientation week event, which garnered significant attendance. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response, we resolved to host additional events this year. The keen interest displayed by the first-year attendees in learning about our team and synthetic biology was evident!

This year, we organized a DNA Extraction event along with a synthetic biology bingo trivia session. The bingo trivia game featured a unique twist, replacing traditional numbers on the bingo sheet with words. These words corresponded to answers for trivia questions that participants had to guess. To claim a win, not only did they need to form a line on their trivia sheet, but they also had to select the correct answers.

Following our orientation event, we successfully compiled a list of 60 emails from University of Guelph students eager to learn more about our team. Additionally, many students began following our team's Instagram account. Thanks to O-Week, our Instagram followership has now exceeded a thousand!

Figure 22: Photos from our orientation event!

Figure 23: Trivia Cards!

To amplify our outreach efforts, our iGEM team had a short session on the Campus and Community Radio in Guelph called CFRU. This radio station is broadcasted throughout Guelph on 93.3 FM. Erica, our wonderful Collab lead, participated in their Clubs Days section which covered different clubs around the University for students and viewers to learn more about. Our segment was part of the “1:00 pm - CFRU Live at Clubs Days! - September 18, 2023 at 13:00” segment and is archived on their website.

Thanks to our College Royal booth, we were able to make a connection with the Guelph Girl Guides. Jennifer from the Guelph Legion Girl Guides invited our team to host a DNA extraction and Candy DNA event on May 9th for the SPARKS (ages 5-6).

In our dynamic outreach event, we created an interactive platform that showcased the wonders of science but also encouraged girls to envision themselves as future scientists and innovators. Our outreach event with the Girl Guides was a resounding success, leaving a memorable mark on both the participants and our team members. Through interactive activities and mentorship, the event not only promoted science education, but also instilled a sense of empowerment and possibility. This remarkable initiative exemplifies the power of outreach in shaping the future of science and fostering a new generation of passionate, confident scientists.

Furthermore, the Girl Guides outreach event was extremely important to our executive team as our executive team has a female majority and as women in STEM we are familiar with being discouraged and having our science education secondary to male students so it was one of our goals to give back to our community and encourage all young female scientists.

Figure 24: Our lovely collaboration lead, Nikoo, assisting with some DNA fun and DNA extraction demo by our President (Madison) and wet lab member (Prakritie)!

Figure 25: Some more DNA extraction and DNA candy fun with the Girl Guides! They’re young scientists in the making!

Elementary School Outreach

On September 25th at 11:30 am and 1:30 pm, iGEM Guelph hosted a presentation and interactive activity at a local elementary school. Each presentation was an hour long and consisted of a short presentation about iGEM, iGEM Guelph, synthetic biology and the DNA extraction and gel electrophoresis activities that we would be conducting.

Through our outreach students in grades 5 and 6 explored the application of synthetic biology to real world problems and were very keen to learn more about synthetic biology and science. They also were taught how to properly use a pipette and load a gel for gel electrophoresis using a DNA ladder.

Many students were passionate about science and wanted to learn as much as possible. We met many future scientists in the making!

Figure 26: Madison presenting at the local elementary school and pipetting practice for the gel electrophoresis!

IGEM Guelph is hosting our first-ever bioethics debate tournament on October 22nd and an information and Q&A session on October 10th in collaboration with the UofG Debate Club for 24 high school debate teams across the province on Discord. Our team aims to host the tournament annually in person for the following years.

The collaboration team put great thought into how we can engage a new demographic of high school students in synthetic biology. While an emphasis on retaining technical knowledge is vital, creativity and innovation come from critically thinking about challenges and their effects on the world outside of the lab and clinical settings. Hosting a debate tournament surrounding the implications of biotechnology was the best way to produce productive discourse and engage participation from a new standpoint.

The tournament is composed of two rounds of prepared debate and two rounds of impromptu, where debaters are given fifteen minutes to prepare their cases with the given motion. The prepared motion given ahead of the tournament is, “This house would legalize human germline engineering”.

The information session will provide debaters with an opportunity to ask iGEM Guelph and UofG Debate members about case construction, critically reviewing academic articles, synthetic biology applications, and our respective teams.

Integrating debate into this field strengthens the next generation of innovators to be effective scientific communicators, properly characterizing and mechanizing claims while weighing the impact on various standpoints and stakeholders.

We will share more about our tournament at the Jamboree and on our Instagram, so stay tuned for more exciting news!

Instagram

Our team used Instagram to connect to our audience using fun and informative posts. Our first few posts consisted of a 3 part “Love is love” series highlighting different LGBTQ+ scientists for pride month. We chose to cover Dr. Alan Hart in our post as not only is he known as a pioneer in the medical field, but he was one of the first female-to-male transgender people. The next scientist we highlighted was Sally Ride, who was the first female American in space. She played a large part in encouraging women to pursue STEM-related careers and is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. The last scientist we highlighted was Dr. James Makokis, a two-spirited, Plains Cree family physician who runs a transgendered-focused clinic in Alberta. It was important for us to highlight a range of scientists in our small series for Pride month as the LGBTQ+ community is full of diversity. We wanted to recognize the significant contributions of LGBTQ+ scientists to the advancement of science and medicine. We hope that this series will inspire young people to pursue careers in science and help to create more inclusive and equitable communities.

Madison presenting at the local elementary school and pipetting practice for the gel electrophoresis!

Figure 27: A collection of our instagram posts highlighting LGBTQ+ scientists!

We made a post discussing a popular myth of all bacteria being harmful. We defined what makes a bacteria “good” in comparison to what makes a bacteria “harmful”. We decided to dedicate a page to talk about E. coli for multiple reasons. First of all, many people have a negative outlook on E. coli because they associate it with getting sick from eating E. coli contaminated lettuce and drinking contaminated water. We wanted to point out that while that is harmful, our bodies rely heavily on the E. coli in our intestines. The second reason why we shared information on E. coli is because it is commonly used in labs as the basis of a project, just like in our project.

Connecting our topic of bacteria, we made a 2 part post on microbes and their products. People are often unaware of how vital microbes are to many of the things we use on a daily basis. In this post, we made sure to cover a large range of industries that use microbes and talk about the benefits that these microbes bring.

We made a post talking about the Great Plate Anomaly and why it is something that has proved to be a challenge to deal with in microbiology. It is important to share this with our audience as many people may not be familiar with the different challenges scientists face when doing experiments.

To view more of our outreach and educational content, or to stay up-to-date with iGEM Guelph, follow us on instagram at igem.guelph. We have more posts planned and hope you enjoy and learn something from them!

TikTok

This year our team launched our first ever TikTok, which was a funny video in the lab. Our TikTok handle is @igem.guelph. We have some videos in our drafts so keep an eye out for more science content! Through our TikTok we hope to create a safe space for learning and to show that labs are fun over our TikTok.

This year, our team had an unprecedented amount of applications. We had over 70 new applications which was approximately double our normal applicant pool. We believe that this was due to all the outreach we did.

As the majority of our team’s new members lack lab experience, we always emphasize training opportunities within the team for them to gain experience and develop their skills in basic microbiology and molecular biology techniques. Our team developed a comprehensive and hands-on training program, called “Intro to Micro”. At this training session, both wet lab and modeling team members watched pipetting, plating, inoculation and aseptic techniques, and then performed these techniques under the supervision of Project Leads, or upper year team members with prior wet lab experience that are competent at performing experiments without supervision.

Intro to Micro ppt:

Also, as the majority of business team members had a limited biology background, they were required to attend a Biology 101 and project presentation. In this presentation, basic biology topics were discussed such as cells and plasmids. In the subsequent project presentation molecular and microbiology techniques including gene insertion, and plasmid digestion were explained.

Furthermore, each team member was required to complete inclusivity modules. Please refer to the Inclusivity page for more details.

This year, our team engaged in several collaborative efforts. In June, we actively participated in NTHU's iGEM Global Map, an collaboration focused on various iGEM teams and their respective projects. Additionally, during the same month, we took part in Waterloo's iGEM Meetup, GemStart. Members from iGEM Guelph engaged in a mini competition alongside iGEM Waterloo and iGEM Toronto, forming mixed groups to tackle a case study. These studies delved into ethical and developmental concerns arising from synthetic biology, addressing questions like, 'If someone were to build a park with dinosaurs, what kind of security system could be employed?' This exercise not only allowed our members to hone their presentation skills, but also provided a platform for enjoyable interaction with other iGEM teams. Furthermore, this meetup offered our team valuable insights into competition criteria and ways to enhance our projects. We extend our gratitude to Waterloo iGEM for this opportunity!

Figure 28: Photos from the Waterloo's iGEM Meetup, GemStart!

In July, we took part in McGill's BIOME book initiative, contributing an entry on the gastric intrinsic factor. This book focuses on proteins utilized by various teams in their projects. Then, from August through early September, we engaged in McGill's Bioethics report, addressing bioethical considerations crucial for project planning across different tracks. Given our project's alignment with the Food & Nutrition track, we meticulously crafted a comprehensive case study spanning over 10 pages, delving into the bioethical nuances of our project, "BloomBiota." The report covered pivotal areas including safety and biosecurity, cultural values, accessibility, informed consent, and environmental impact. These ethical concerns are further explored on our Human Practices page. It’s vital to emphasize that these concerns are not isolated but rather wholly related.

Our outreach has been centered within our local community as we recognize the profound influence we can have on those closest to us. By starting local, we can make a tangible impact, building strong foundations within our community that will ripple outwards.

In the realm of synthetic biology, misconceptions and stigmas can often hinder progress. This field is not as widely discussed as it deserves, considering its immense potential. Through our various outreach efforts, including but not limited to informative posts on our Instagram, informational booths, and presentations, we strive to raise awareness about synthetic biology. By providing accessible information, we aim to break down barriers and promote a broader dialogue surrounding this field.

Views on synthetic biology, and thus genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), are diverse and are impacted by many factors within society, such as cultural, educational background, and personal beliefs. However, some common perspectives persist.   1. Support for Feeding a Growing Population

Many believe that genetic engineering is an essential tool for addressing global food security issues (Goold et al., 2018; Lv et al., 2021). They believe that synthetic biology can help produce higher-yielding crops through resistance to pests, diseases, and environmental stressors, which is becoming increasingly important due to global warming and the impact it has on crop production (Goold et al., 2018; Lv et al., 2021).

There is concern about potential environmental and ecological consequences associated with the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment. Concern lies with the potential for unintended effects on non-target species, biodiversity, and ecosystem dynamics (Casals-Pascual et al., 2018; Mota et al., 2021; Rafeeq et al., 2023).

There have been voices of concern regarding the safety of consuming genetically modified organisms. There is worry about potential long-term health effects, immune response, among other concerns (Bawa & Anilakumar, 2013).

Within society, there are individuals with strong ethical beliefs about genetic engineering and what constitutes as “playing with nature” and thus view genetic engineering as unacceptable. Also, there is the argument that the use of synthetic biology in food and nutrition challenges the definition of natural and authentic food (Siipi, 2015).

Common misconceptions regarding genetic engineering and synthetic biology are often the result of limited exposure to accurate information (or even misinformation). Some common misconceptions include that genetically modified organisms are not natural and therefore are unsafe, they are harmful to human health and the environment, and they are designed for profit and corporate interests among other misconceptions and misinformation (Marris, 2001).

Public perception and education plays a pivotal role in shaping attitudes towards genetic engineering and synthetic biology. The understanding and perception of these technologies by the general population can significantly impact their acceptance, adoption, and support. As such, we have emphasized addressing these misconceptions with clear, concise and accessible education through our outreach.

Our engagement in orientation events further solidifies our commitment to mutual learning and knowledge-sharing. By supporting enthusiasts and welcoming new members onto our team, we create a dynamic space for ideas to flourish and evolve. Through this engagement, we not only enrich our understanding but also contribute to a collective pool of knowledge that others can draw from and build upon.

STEM education and support remain at the forefront of our work, with a focus on inclusivity for all young minds. Our outreach efforts have been designed to emphasize the importance of scientific thinking and creativity, regardless of gender or background. Currently, women are nearly 30% less likely than men to enroll in post-secondary STEM programs and are often underrepresented in the workforce (Chan et al., 2021). Our inclusive approach ensures that more individuals can shape, contribute to, and participate in the world of synthetic biology. Providing equal access to science education, especially for young girls as we have done through our outreach with the Girl Guides, challenges traditional gender stereotypes. It sends a powerful message that science is not limited by gender, but rather is open to anyone with a passion for discovery. This inclusivity paves the way for a more diverse and representative scientific community.

Through our outreach initiatives, we hope to pave the way for a future where synthetic biology is not only understood but actively shaped by a diverse and inspired generation of scientists. As we have seen through our outreach, young minds are inherently curious and imaginative. Science education at a young age nurtures this natural inclination, teaching children to think critically, approach problems systematically, and seek innovative solutions. They engage in conversations, ask questions, and learn from one another. This fosters a culture of mutual learning and becomes a creative approach to learning that is essential for synthetic biology, as it encourages out-of-the-box thinking and the exploration of new possibilities.  

We strive to build a foundation of knowledge that can be passed down for future generations. When we invest in youth, we build a foundation of knowledge that ensures that the progress made in synthetic biology is not only sustained but also expanded upon in the next generations but also makes science more accessible.

To further iGEM’s mandate of accessibility and open knowledge, we have created a document for teams looking to start community outreach with helpful tricks.

Bawa, A.S., & Anilakumar, K.R. (2013). Genetically modified foods: safety, risks and public concerns—a review. Journal of Food Science and Technology, 50(6), 1035-1046. https://doi.10.1007/s13197-012-0899-1

Casals-Pascual, C., Vergara, A., & Vila, J. (2018). Intestinal microbiota and antibiotic resistance: Perspectives and solutions. Human Microbiome Journal, 9, 11-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humic.2018.05.002

Chan, P. C. W., Handler, T., & Frenette, M. (2021, November 24). Gender differences in STEM enrolment and graduation: What are the roles of academic performance and preparation? https://doi.org/10.25318/36280001202101100004-eng

Goold, H. D., Wright, P., & Hailstones, D. (2018). Emerging Opportunities for Synthetic Biology in Agriculture. Genes, 9(7), 341. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes9070341

Lv, X., Wu, Y., Gong, M., Deng, J., Gu, Y., Liu, Y., Li, J., Du, G., Lebesma-Amaro, R., Liu, L., & Chen, J. (2021). Synthetic biology for future food: Research progress and future directions. Future Foods, 2, 100025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fufo.2021.100025

Marris, C. (2001). Public views on GMOs: deconstructing the myths. EMBO Reports, 2(7), 545-548. https://doi.org/10.1093/embo-reports/kve142

Mota, R., Pinto, M., Palmeira, J., Gonçalves, D., & Ferreira, H. (2021). Multidrug-resistant bacteria as intestinal colonizers and evolution of intestinal colonization in healthy university students in Portugal. Access Microbiology, 3(1), 182. https://doi.org/10.1099%2Facmi.0.000182

Rafeeq, H., Afsheen, N., Rafique, S., Arshad, A., Intisar, M., Hussain, A., Bilal, M., & Iqbal, H. M.N. (2023). Genetically engineered microorganisms for environmental remediation. Chemosphere, 310, 136751. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2022.136751

Siipi, H. (2015). Is Genetically Modified Food Unnatural? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 28, 807-816. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-015-9568-5