Difference between revisions of "Team:Groningen/Engagement"

This years’ Maakfestival was held at the Groninger Forum and provided Dutch manufactures – in the broadest sense – who are living in the north of the Netherlands with the opportunity to excite teens about diverse technical projects. We had our own iGEM booth with various attributes from the laboratory, such as (properly sealed) Escherichia coli bacteria with Green Fluorescent Protein and talked about synthetic bacteria to interested people from every age group. Participants were invited to write their own opinion on bacteria, ranging from ‘cute’ to ‘useful’. Besides that Joana gave a short talk about iGEM and synthetic biology in one of the ‘maker talks’. Sometimes, we were even surprised what some children already knew about bacteria. In the end we were really excited to introduce others to the fascinating world of synthetic biology.

On Tuesday the 16th of May 2017 the 17th edition of the Netherlands Biotechnology Conference (NBC-17) was organized by the Dutch Biotechnology Association (NBV). During this day, 135 professionals and students working in the biotechnology work field were connected to each other and informed during several interactive sessions and keynotes about the latest developments in their work field. Here, we gave a pitch about this years’ Groningen iGEM project and were allowed to present our poster together with other Dutch iGEM teams!

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The European iGEM meet up for the Netherlands was held in Delft this year. The meet up started with a talk by Cees Dekker, a well known physicist. It was quite interesting to hear about the common ground between physics and biology in his talk. After the break we had the talk from Denis Murphy, he is highly involved in palm oil. Palm oil is used a lot for cosmetics in richer countries, and for sustenance in poorer countries. He expanded on a specific application for genetic engineering for making sustainable palm oil plantations. The main event of the day was of course the poster presentations of all the iGEM teams themselves. We walked around a lot, talking to pretty much every team at least once. It was very nice to see all the Dutch teams again here after we had met them during the Dutch iGEM meet up in Wageningen. During all this we handed out our 3D printed phages to the teams too. The last part of the day was a BBQ with some drinks. We left together with some of the other teams and talked more about how our respective projects were going.

We attended the 12th LAB Symposium in Egmond aan Zee on the 28th of August. This is a yearly one week event about Lactic Acid Bacteria. Thanks to the organizing committee we were able to attend the symposium for one day with three people of the team. This was a really great experience. It gave us the opportunity to present our poster during the poster sessions and to talk to researchers who are specialized in working with CRISPR-Cas, bacteriophages and Lactococcus lactis. We talked with Douwe van Sinderen, expert in bacteriophage research at the Universiry College Cork, and Sylvain Moineau, one of the key scientist in the discovery of CRISPR.

The Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute (GBB) is the centre for biomolecular sciences at the University of Groningen. We were invited to give a presentation of our project and show our poster in the poster sessions. During the event we got the opportunity to explain our project to other researchers from the university.

After our collaboration we were invited by the RIVM to join their event 'RIVM Kennisparade' together with all other Dutch iGEM teams. Around 1500 visitors were present this day. We were part of the biotechnology section where we examples of biotechnology in the future. We were excited that so many people were interested in our project and wanted to know what it was about. We had some great discussions with visitors about synthetic biology and the ethical aspects of it. Surprisingly, we got mostly positive reactions about our product design, even if it would be used in a factory!

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We met with Ferdinand van der Graaf to discus the game we are designing about synthetic biology safety. He works as a researcher at the UMCG hospital, as well as a teacher at a local highscool. In his teachings he uses a lot of educational games, and had previously designed a game to teach about natural selection. We talked about how to implement game elements in a balanced way while not giving up too much learning elements. Furthermore he recommended to stick to tried and true game elements that work, something we found to be true too.

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We contacted Richel Bilderbeek to give us some tips about preparing lessons for children from 10 to 12 years old. He is highly experienced in educating 7 till 18 year-olds. We are working together with the Scholieren Academie to educate kids. The general goal is informing the kids about the university. What do students do? What am I, a molecular biology student, doing in a laboratory? The Scholieren Academie wants to start this project, because research has shown that kids from the eastern part of the province Groningen, choose less for higher education. By starting really early with informing these kids about the possibilities of the university, the Scholieren Academie hopes that children will choose more often for higher education after primary school. We went to some schools to give a guest lecture. A few days later, the children came to the lab to do some experiments themselves.

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During the summer we supervised two Honours Bachelor students with their own synthetic biology project. "For the Honours College we wanted to perform a deepening research in the 2nd year. We wanted this research to be related to microbiology. So one of us then came with the idea to contact the iGEM team of Groningen. We told them that we would like to try to transform bacteria in a way that they would digest microplastics. We quickly got a response from the iGEM team and they stated that they were glad to let us do our research within their research group. A meeting was set up to meet with 2 PhD students to talk about our plans. The team was very helpful during this starting phase, since we had never set up our own research yet. After a couple more meetings our plans took a more realistic shape due to the tips iGEM feasibility. After all these meetings it was time to start working in the lab. Here we got assigned a supervisor which we could ask questions and he helped us get started. The further we got into the 3 weeks of our research, the more responsibilities we got from the iGEM team. Working on your own in a lab on your own research was a new and very instructive experience. At first we had to get used to this responsibility, because in our regular program all practicals are structured perfectly around you as a student, and so you do not come across the challenges of a real research. An example of this was our strain of bacteria, which was not as competent as we were used to. All in all, we learned a lot about dealing with unexpected complications during synthetic biology research. Therefore, our time with the iGEM team has enriched us with many new experiences. "