Team:WashU StLouis/Engagement
Public Engagement, Education, and Outreach
Pre-Engineering Institute BioBuilder Activity
Throughout the Summer, the Washington University in St. Louis School of Engineering and Applied Science hosts a Pre-Engineering Institute for high school students to experience the various disciplines of engineering. During one of their afternoon sessions, we presented on the field of synthetic biology and the kinds of research being done. After giving them a general idea of what synthetic biology is, we taught them about the central dogma pathway of biology and how the expression of a gene can be tuned with varying strengths of promoters and ribosome binding sites. From there, we led them in the BioBuilder iTune lab activity which involves tuning the expression of Beta-galactosidase. As they performed the experiment, we answered any questions they had and assisted them in using basic wet lab equipment (i.e. micropippetors, microcentrifuge tubes, spectrophotometers).
BioBuilder Professional Development Workshop at Monsanto
On July 20th, we went to Monsanto's Chesterfield campus to speak to local high school teachers and administrators about our involvement in iGEM and what we love about the program. We also presented on our project to give them an example of an iGEM project and synthetic biology research. The high school teachers were interested in starting iGEM teams at their own high schools and wanted to learn more how our team operates.
