Team:TU Dresden/Practices/Social Outreach
Social Outreach (LNdW)
The Long Night of Science (Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft) is an annual event in the city Dresden that takes place in the beginning of summer. Its purpose is to share the exciting science and research that takes place in Dresden in a way that every type of audience would understand and appreciate. Reaching a broad audience with such a rich and diverse background provides a great challenge for the presenters, who need to get creative in order to successfully inform the public about the cutting-edge research done in this great city. Presentations aimed to reveal the magic behind the curtain, dancing a delicate balance between providing mind-boggling setups and sufficient captivating information. We were part of this event, presenting iGEM and our project with our own booth located in the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD). To display our idea to everyone, we prepared a poster, constructed a simplified model, set up a flow system and designed flyers in German and English. You can learn more about these by clicking on the following picture:
Poster
The poster was designed in German, because the expected visitors were mostly Germans (a translation to English is available here). It contained mainly general information in order to give the public an idea of what can be realized with synthetic biology nowadays. Click on our poster to have a closer look!
Model
A classical approach for drug development is based on the phage display technique. The huge library of binding candidates in the phage display was represented by three bricks: a circle, a clamp and a bottle-like structure. The target was represented by a plate with structured holes. In the classical approach, each brick would try to fit the hole of the target. Our method should use moldable structures to produce the best fitting by pressing it through the target hole. This makes the method directed but we also wanted it to be continuous. To do so, we added a system represented by the roller chain, which automates the fitting cycles and improves the structure round after round. We wanted to construct this small model because for most people that visited it was much easier to imagine mechanical concepts than biological systems.
Flow system
The flow system was presented with the goal of providing an overview of our continue stirred-tank reactor cultivation. The presented setup contained a 1 L bioreactor (a), the stirring (b), a pump (c) and stir-controller (d), and the lagoon (e), where the phage evolution will take place, and a magnetic stirrer (f). With the aim of only demonstrating the built up of our system we left out the reservoir for the media which is used in the continuous lab experiments. The milk dilution which resembled the E. coli culture was pumped in circle between the lagoon and the stirred-tank reactor. During the LNdW the setup showed itself as helpful for explaining the setup of the experiment even though it was not 100 % accurate.
Flyers
Our team mate Sethuraman drew an amazing picture showing the same concept as the model did. We made flyers out of his artistic skills and we included some additional information about us on the backside.
If you want to check the information we had on our flyer, you can click here for English or here for German.
