Community Outreach

Our team reached out to the community in several different ways throughout the course of our project. Most of our outreach was geared toward elementary though high school students. All of our outreach projects included activities in biology research, talking about what iGEM is, what it means to be on a team, and what our group was doing for our project. In many cases we simplified a lot of terms, but we were still able to go over general genetic engineering concepts and how they were going to fit in with the heavy metal detection and design of the probiotic within our project.

Touch Tomorrow

Touch Tomorrow was our largest outreach event. It is an event held at WPI in the summer to help expose the public to different discoveries in science and technology. There are many activities and demonstration run throughout the day, and our iGEM team hosted 3 activities in one of the labs on campus throughout the day. Over 6,000 people visited campus this year, and many visited our lab.

Strawberry DNA extraction was the first of the activities, and definitely a favorite. Our team members rotated through the different activities, and taught each kid, and usually their parents, about how squishing the strawberry with a detergent-salt solution would break open the cells and how adding the isopropanol would allow them to collect the Strawberry's DNA. People were interested to learn that they could do DNA extractions on fruits at home because many are polyploidy, but they were most excited about being able to keep their DNA in a microcentrofuge tube on a string as a necklace.

The fluorescence booth was also very interesting for many people. They were interested in how a bacteria expressing a certain protein, in this case GFP or RFP, could glow a certain color under UV light. They also were amazed that we could grow this bacteria in certain patterns, or pictures, on the plates.

The third activity was Kool Aid gel electrophoresis. This was done in smaller groups and required a sign up sheet because of its detail. The kids who came got to load a salt water gel with a Kool Aid glycerol mix and see how the dyes ran at different lengths. They were then able to take their piece of gel home. There were a lot of questions about what gels are, how they're normally done, and why they're important.

The last activity was a Lead Water Pollution Guess and Check Map. A blank map of the US was posted outside the door of our lab along with stickers for people to place where they thought there was lead pollution in drinking water. It was no surprise that most of the guesses were near Flint, MI. Inside the lab we posted a the same map only with labels for the areas where lead pollution was reported. We also posted a map specific to locations in Massachusetts because of WPI's location.

In preparation for this event the whole team went to a general training, prepared posters specific to iGEM, our project, and the Kool Aid gel electrophoresis activity, and actually completed and explained each activity.

Worcester Technical High School

There were 10 freshman from Worcester Tech who visited. They each did a miniprep of a pre-spun down culture. They also were able to prepare a wet slide and compare 3 different plasmid expressions, high GFP, low GFP, and RFP. They were surprised that there was such a big difference between the high and low GFP. They were also surprised that their minipreps had such a high DNA yield; they were able to check this with the nano drop after completing their minipreps. Most had yields between 85 and 120 ng/μL. In addition to the activity, we also introduced ourselves, our project, and what iGEM means. The students and their two teachers were definitely very excited to hear about our project because they are directly affected by lead water pollution at their school. It was also a very important experience for our team because it made the issue both very real and very close to home.

WPI Women's Summer Program

Stem Saturdays