Cooperation with Bloodbank Tübingen

Information and Feedback

Our project has the aim to overcome blood shortage by transforming blood of type AB and B into the universal type 0 which would help blood banks and hospitals with the availability of blood. Transforming blood into the universal type 0 would allow for patients with blood type 0, AB and B to have higher chances of getting a blood transfusion. Because of the possible impact our project could have, it was clear to us, that we wanted to talk to the potential users of our biotechnology. Consequently, we contacted doctors and hospitals asking them for their opinion and especially about possible challenges and how to overcome them. We got the chance to talk to a research scientist involved in the blood bank as well as in erythrocyte research. She gave us practical insides into how blood is handled in the blood bank and how erythrocytes are studied in the lab. We were able to discuss into which step from preparation and testing of donor blood to the recipient finally receiving their donation, our approach would fit best. Furthermore, she showed us how erythrocytes can be isolated from blood and kindly offered erythrocyte samples in case we reach this stage of testing.

Cakeday at the Bloodbank

Our aim is to have more blood available to patients that need blood transfusions. In addition to the restrictions because of blood groups that could be overcome with our approach, another big problem that blood banks face is the decrease in blood donors. Especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, less people were willing to donate blood and the criteria to donate were raised. As a result, the shortage of blood is further increased. That is why we decided to raise awareness of the blood shortage and wanted to inform people on how blood donations work and how people can become blood donors. Furthermore, we wanted to make it more attractive to donate blood. To make blood donation more inviting, we decided to give donors a piece of cake after having donated blood. Usually, a donor receives some bread rolls as compensation for his donation. We wanted to make it more inviting by adding cake to that menu. In short, we cooperate with the blood bank in this regard by organizing a cake day that we both advertised on our social media platforms. This cake day will take place on the 18th of October.

Visit to a school and introduction to University

On Wednesday the 4th of October, we visited the high school “Gymnasium Unterrieden” in Sindelfingen, a city nearby Tübingen and joined an event sponsored by the Gips-Schüle foundation to talk to students about studying science in universities. This event that the “MINT-ambassadors” of the University of Tübingen held, has the goal to explain how studying a natural science, computer science and technical fields of study can look like. Different university students (from fields like nanoscience, biochemistry and physics) introduced their field of study and how their everyday life looks like as a student. We, as members of iGEM Team Tübingen were able to give further insights into how studying can look like as a participant of iGEM. We were able to explain synthetic biology and biotechnology and why global problems can be tackled with it. We explained how we try to combat blood shortage with our iGEM project on universal blood.

After we gave our talk, all students had the chance to choose either one of the subjects presented or our team and seperated into groups. accordingly In these groups of 8-12 students, we had one hour of hands-on activity where they were able to experiment themselves. Our acitivity was split into two parts. First, we gave them current problems and asked them to come up with creative ideas about how to solve them. Together, we worked out how these ideas can be developed into a reasonable project can. We also looked at the different levels the problems could be tackled on. Second, we gave each group a limited number of different types of packaging material and an egg which they should prevent from cracking when dropped from the second floor. We wanted them to use their materials in a creative way and think of individual solutions. We wanted to show them how similar it is to the approach of synthetic biology to use biological bricks in a new and innovative way. Interestingly, each group came up with different solutions and all the eggs survived in the end.

Article in BioSpectrum

We were able to explain our project and present our team in BioSpectrum. Stay tuned and check out the BioSpektrum magazin 6 to find our team.

Science communication on our Instagram channel

ot only is it important to us, that we discuss our idea with experts in the field, we also want to reach the broad community. That is why we decided to set up a social media post series on blood related topics and diseases that we found interesting and wanted other people to gain knowledge about. We wanted to share our fascination for this field and encourage others to take a closer look at the red substance. In our first series, we discussed different colors of blood in different species of life ranging from thetypical red blood to other variants like green or even colorless blood. In our second series, we looked at different diseases associated with blood like the sickle cell disease or anemia.