The Big Bang fair is the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) for young people in the UK. This year they also came to Bristol and the Bristol iGEM team was invited along to show young people the exciting and rewarding opportunities in STEM, especially in Synthetic Biology. At the fair we educated children about the dangers of NOx pollution and how we plan to solve the problem by engineering E. coli bacteria to remove this pollutant. We also used this opportunity to develop a fun synthetic biology game, the plasmid hoopla, as well as getting the kids involved with designing their own pod designs to contain our E. coli.

We asked both children and adults to design pods to hold our bacteria. The pods needed to be secure, have a large surface area for maximum efficiency and look good! Here is what they came up with...