Team:BroadRun-NorthernVA/Education and Public Outreach

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• HOME
• PROJECT
  • Problem
  • Solution
  • Methods
  • Results
  • Applied Design
• PARTS
• NOTEBOOK
• SAFETY
• HUMAN PRACTICES
  • Overview
  • Education and Public Outreach
  • Sustainability
  • Further Applications
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• ATTRIBUTIONS
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Education and Public Outreach

1. EDUCATION

Planning: Starting our iGEM team was no easy feat. We overcame many obstacles from financing our team to a lack of interest amongst peers, perhaps stemming from a lack of understanding of the power of science and engineering to bring social good. Our age group lead very busy lives with many heavily involved in sports, volunteer work, working part-time, or just keeping up with school. Synthetic biology and iGEM were unknown within our school community. Our earliest efforts through multiple information meetings, direct appeals to science teachers, did not bring in the students we needed. Also, with competing interests for the summer, we ran into problems of retaining students to do lab research in the summer months. We persisted despite these problems, and eventually assembled our geographically diverse, but passionate team seeking to explore synthetic biology as a potential means to solve world problems. Given our own experience with the lack of understanding of synthetic biology in particular, and the application of science and engineering in general, in our community, we placed a high priority to educate and inspire students at our school and also at the feeder middle school. Here is what we did.

Lab Safety: To negate the possibility of any physical injuries, proper lab conduct was followed at all times. These procedures included:

• Wearing gloves and goggles
• Disinfecting the workspace
• Following chemical safety procedures
• Maintaining a neat and well organized work environment
• Using bleach to sterilize unused cultures
• Keeping food and drink out of the lab
  
  
  
  

  Product Safety

  Before we allowed our product to leave the lab we carefully tested for any adverse effects it could have on the environment.

  There are several options to minimize risks to the environment:

  • Incorporate a kill switch after a certain number of generations, or activated by a certain compound, so that the genetically modified yeast cells will not have a chance adversely affect the environment in the event the cells escape the water system/lab
  • Minimize the risk that our genetically engineered yeast will escape into the environment by isolating the secreted amylase from the microbial culture, and only using the enzyme to treat the water. The yeast itself, will never leave the lab.