Team:Linkoping Sweden/HP/Silver

Human Practices Silver


Public engagement


During this project we have learned so much about synthetic biology and Alzheimer´s disease. We are very proud of our project and eager to spread the word about our work, our organization and the iGEM competition. Since we started this project we have joined several events to get the knowledge of iGEM to spread. We have also been active on social media. We have been posting pictures of the daily labwork and other events to get people interested in our project.

Nordic iGEM Conference

The team from Copenhagen Denmark invited all the Nordic iGEM teams to a mini iGEM conference. The conference was held through June 9th to June 11th and a total of nine teams from Denmark, Finland and Sweden were represented.

The conference started with presentations from two Danish iGEM-teams from 2016, CosmoCrops and DTU BioBuilders, where they told us about their projects and experiences of the Giant Jamboree in Boston. This was followed by a barbeque, where the teams had a chance to get to know each other and get a sneak peek of what each team had decided to do for their project.

The second day had the full day scheduled, starting with workshops called Business & Innovation in iGEM and Communication, how to sell your project. Later, there was a mini jamboree where all represented teams presented their projects. The day ended with a nice dinner, where the winner of the mini jamboree was announced and team Lund was the lucky winner. They received the prize, a golden pipette, and were asked to host the next Nordic iGEM Conference.

The last day started with a workshop called Feedback session, where the teams gave each other feedback on their projects and presentation. Another workshop followed in Ethics. The day then ended in a final lunch with the other teams.

Hike

In connection with the reception of new students at Linköping University, a hike is annually organized in order to inform and encourage new students to get involved in university associations. LiU iGEM took the opportunity to tell them about our project and our organization. We gave a short presentation about iGEM and what we do. Thereafter we played either a game or told them a riddle.

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Linköping City Festival

Every year our local town hosts a big city festival at the end of summer. The festival brings a lot of joy to both adults and kids. This year LiU iGEM decided to join the festival. Since our project focuses on Alzheimer’s disease we asked Linkoping dementia association if they wanted to join us at the festival. Together we rented a big tent for the last weekend of the festival. We had activities for all ages to reach out to as many people as possible.


For the younger crowd we had a mini-lab where the kids could try to grow their own colorful bacteria. We had prepared petri dishes filled with vegan strawberry jelly, some bacteria stock of colored water and of course the magical incubator. The kids got to use pipettes to dilute the bacteria stock in a test tube and then spread a few drops of their dilute on a jelly-plate. Then we put the plate in the incubator for a few seconds, when the plate came out it was covered with jelly beans which we called bacteria. We got a lot of surprised faces and laughs from both kids and their parents! They got even more shocked when we told them that the plate was edible. We used gelatin free jelly and jelly beans to make sure as many people as possible could participate in our activities.


At the festival we also lead an interactive lab with DNA purification from kiwifruit. This lab was more aimed for adults and it was very popular. Most of the people who joined in for this lab had no previous knowledge of this kind of biology, so this lab raised a lot of questions. It was a fantastic way to start conversations and to share information with the public.

We made a collaboration with Valencia UPV iGEM, iGEM AQA_Unesp and SECA NZ iGEM for this festival. They wrote us summaries of their projects for us to share. The public was very interested and amazed by all the things you could do with synthetic biology. Of course, the people thought it was a lot to take in and sometimes hard to understand. The teams had done an excellent job with simplifying their project description and we were ready to answer questions. A lot of interesting conversations came out of this collaboration and we are very grateful for Valencia UPV iGEM, iGEM AQA_Unesp and team SECA NZ iGEM for helping us out with this.


We learned a lot about Alzheimer’s this summer and we wanted to pass the information on. To do this in the best feasible way we made a quiz (data and corrext answers available here to find out what the public knew about the disease. The questions in our quiz are covering a broad spectrum of the general knowledge about Alzheimer’s. We thought that when we knew what the public already knew and what they didn´t know we would decide what kind of information we wanted to promote on our website. We lounged the quiz at the festival and the Linkoping dementia association helped us to spread the word and to get people to answer. Since then we have had the link to the quiz up on our website and we have promoted the quiz on our Facebook page.



International Alzheimer's Day

The international Alzheimer’s day falls on September 21 and to acknowledge this day we decided to visit one of our towns nursing homes specialized in elderly with Alzheimer’s disease. We did this to get a better view of how people with different dementia diseases live and to see their daily routine. Five of the members from our team met up and went to the nursing home. We were greeted by one of the coordinators for the elderly care in Linkoping and she took the time to show us around.

At this nursing home they had a spa were the elderly could take a bath, get their hair cut or get their nails cut and painted.

Since patients with Alzheimer’s tend to get a loss in apatite they worked extra with that at this home. They had a private cook who focused on making the food look extra tasty and putting some extra thought in how they presented the food on the plates. They also had a routine of having some simple gymnastics before lunch in the purpose of increasing the elderly’s apatite.

At Sandrinoparken the staff have a working approach called IBIC – Individual Need In Center (Individens behov i centrum in Swedish) – which is a systematic way of working with person centered care. They make sure to put the individual needs in center. The elderly staying here can decide what planned activities to attend or not and also make requests for individual activities such as walks or spa-time.


Media


Social Media

By frequently updating our Facebook and Instagram account, we have allowed our followers to see how our work is proceeding. In our posts we showed different experiment from the lab. Our universe has created an Instagram account that is followed by a lot of the students and lecturers. The purpose of this account is to let the universities different organizations to show their work. This account gets occupied by a different society every week. We had this Instagram account one week during the summer and will be occupying it again the week of the jamboree in Boston. This has been a fantastic way for us to reach out to more students at our university and to get the interest of iGEM to rise.

Reaching the broader public

We wanted to reach the public and inform them about our project. This has been seen in the newspaper Fokus Almedalen and on the LiU website.