At Aix-Marseille university, we think that the public engagement is crucial to science. Helping technology propagation among all must be a priority. Therefore, we choose to participate to some event, allowing us to explain to all synthetic biology and molecular engineering.

This topic was important for us, in France, because the public opinion of GMOs and synthetic biology is generally awful. Our team wanted to establish communication with the public to converse with them about benefits and drawback of synthetic biology.

March for Science

We participated in the March for Science in Marseille. We found it important to show our support to science, institutions and the role they play in improving our society through innovation. We think that encouraging scientific research is an investment for the future generations.

Thus we joined scientists and concerned citizens at the March for Science. It is important to show that science must have a greater role in policymaking. As a scientific community we need to learn how to reach out to the public.

Village des Sciences

A "village des sciences" was organized in Marseille. We see this event as an opportunity to share our project with the public. Thus we prepare some poster about synthetic biology and KILL XYL project.

But we also think that, this type of event is an opportunity to communicate to youth about biology and science. Therefore, we extract with them banana's DNA. Lots of child were curious and interested by biology and some of them even proposed new things to do with the help of synthetic biology (e.g. Banana with the taste of kiwis).

Biotechnology forum

As Polytech Marseille organized each year a forum about biotechnology, we used this as an opportunity to present our project to engineering student and teachers. Therefore we did a presentation and a poster session about KILL XYL.

Thankfully, everything went well and we get interesting feedback about our project. The forum was so much fun and we get the opportunity to present the iGEM competition to new student. This will help to get a new team next year, full of motivated and talented students.

Public survey

As we said, the public opinion should always be taken into account in all product conception's step. Thus, we did a public survey, firstly to sensibilize people to the Xylella fastidiosa problem and secondly to know their mind about our project.