Team:Bielefeld-CeBiTec/StreetScience

Street Science

Street science is an event organized by Bielefeld Marketing which takes place three times a year in Bielefeld downtown. The aim of this event is to communicate science to the public.

We participated in this event on April 4th 2015, a Sunday open for business, from 12 am till 6 pm. It was the first time we presented our topic and team in the public. Therefore, we had created posters about synthetic biology, the iGEM competition and our topic. As it was very crowded, we got into conversation with many people and informed them about problems with drinking water and the difference between synthetic biology and other areas like e.g. bionics.

We also explained what synthetic biology is and where you can find products from genetically engineered organisms in everyday life. To evoke enthusiasm for science in children, we offered several small experiments. The most popular experiment was the DNA isolation. With simple household objects like salt, spiritus and detergents, children could extract DNA out of fruits such as bananas and kiwis. For younger children we offered chromatography with filter paper and creating ink images by pipetting ink onto sugar cubes in water. As a gift, we sent them the images and let them take the chromatograms. For adults, we had prepared a set of memory cards with images of products and the corresponding production organism to show them where biotechnology is hidden outside the laboratory. As genetic engineering is a controversial issue in Germany, we tried to lower concerns by outlining the facts about this topic in a small presentation. As a highlight, we created a chemical garden every two hours by adding metal salts to a solution of sodium silicate.

As we had already decided to focus on water analytics at that time, we did a survey to find out which water contaminants are most important to people and which requirements they have regarding a biosensor. The results helped us in defining in which direction we wanted to go with our project.

Survey

We asked people to name the substances they would like to have a sensor for. The most frequent answer was heavy metals, which showed us that even in Germany, this is a relevant problem to tackle. A lot of people were also concerned about drug residues, but after some research, we decided against including them in our sensor. However, we tried to make our test strips easily extensible so that other contaminants can be incorporated in the future.

It was very important to us to develop a biosensor that can be used outside the lab. Therefore, we asked which requirements people have with regard to such a sensor. The results showed us that our biosensor needs to be simple, cheap and reliable.

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