Team:UNIFI/Engagement
Public engagement
One of the primary objectives of the iGEM competition is to promote a dialogue with the general public about biotechnology and synthetic biology. In order to achieve this goal, the UNIFI iGEM team has initiated a series of public outreach activities which involves organizing visits to select secondary and high schools across Florence and surrounding towns. We have visited Liceo Scientifico Guido Castelnuovo and IIS Leonardo Da Vinci, both located in Florence, and ITS Tullio Buzzi of Prato and the secondary school Filippo Mazzei of Prato. During such visits, we presented to the younger audience some useful information about what the iGEM competition entails and what kind of project we are working on. We also explained the fact that we have chosen a science art project involving Escherichia coli and fluorescent proteins as a useful tool to spread awareness to the general public about the infinite possibilities that biotechnology and genetical engineering can accomplish, even in seemingly unrelated fields such as the arts. Conversion of bacterial fluorescence emission to musical notes also provides an opportunity to introduce biotechnological concepts to people with visual impairments. We also promoted discussions with students about controversial topics such as cloning, stem cells, vaccines and genetically engineered organisms (GMOs) and we happily answered their questions to quench their scientific curiosities. Judging from the questions asked by most of the students, it would appear that the ones who elicited the most interest were gene therapy, genetic engineering applied to animals and the ethics of both human and animal cloning. Curiously the topics that aroused the least interest include vaccinations, plant biotechnologies and the controversies surrounding them.
We also performed pre- and post-presentation surveys using questionnaires. The surveys where carried out to collect information about the students’ knowledge and interest of biotechnology and synthetic biology pre- and post-presentation. We handed questionnaires to students immediately before starting the presentation and right after the end of the question-and-answer sessions. The pre-presentation questionnaire is formulated in a way to understand students’ perception of the relationship between science and art, the utility of the current biotechnologies carried out by the industries around the world and their level of interest on biotechnology in general before the start of the presentation. The post-presentation questionnaires on the other hand aim to understand the effectiveness and usefulness of our outreach efforts on secondary school students. In particular the questionnaires were formulated in a way that enables us to measure student satisfaction of the presentation and subsequent group discussions. The questionnaires also asked them about how our outreach activities influenced their perception on science art, biotechnology and synthetic biology and whether our outreach activities increased their interest on the field. We also surveyed them about their perception of the ethics of using microbes or higher organisms for science art purposes.
The results of our statistical analysis of the information we collected from the completed surveys can be found here.
Laboratory with students
In the day of the 20th of October many students from the high school Guido Castelnuovo came to visit our lab at the Department of Biology in Sesto Fiorentino. We welcomed them with our P.I. prof. Alessio Mengoni and to start great we began the tour with the DNA sequencing dedicated room. We showed them the differences between various generations of sequencing machines along with the standards PCR instruments. Right afterwards we brought the students to our lab to show them where we conducted all of our experiments and all the different protocols we used during the summer, from simple refrigerators to store DNA and fridges to store colonies to autoclave and electroporation instruments; we also gifted them with aluminium coated cuvettes for electroporation. We displayed a full electrophoresis preparation together with the run and luckily, we got no smear! Also, they had the opportunity so smell the different cultivations we had in our fridge, all formed by the same strain of Escherichia coli and someone liked that, yikes!
Finally, with the help of our professor, expert in plant microbiology, we brought them to the greenhouse where plants from species like Euphorbia and Nicotiana are cultivated to investigate the interactions between plants roots and Rhizobium spp. in the formation of roots node.
We asked them in the end to give us their impressions and opinions about the visit and in general on our project, and their answers were as positive as their smiles while leaving the department!
Team Unifi
unifi.igem@gmail.com
