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From 2010.igem.org

We have made an effort to reach out to the public in order to increase awareness about synthetic biology because we noticed, whilst talking to family and friend about our project, that the general public knows little about this subject. To do this we thought it would be best to start with high school students, the future generation.

One of our team members has visited high school biology classes to present our project and tell the students about iGEM.

[PHOTO PRESENTATION]

“It was a lot of fun visiting the schools and teaching those kids. In the beginning they were quite noisy but they turned out to be intrigued by synthetic biology and listened quietly.” - Maarten

After presenting at high schools we invited schools to send their students to attend a master class in which they could get to experience what is like working at university as a researcher. Furthermore we wanted to show them all life on earth is build up out of the same basic parts and that we still share a lot of genes with organisms as different to us as tomatoes. We illustrated this with the example of topoisomerase II which is present in both man and tomato and is a very essential and highly conserved protein.

After the master class we moved on to the Kenniscafé (Knowledge Café) which is a monthly event organized by the University of Groningen which is meant to get the public acquainted with current research within the natural sciences at the University of Groningen.

This month’s issue was appropriately dedicated to synthetic biology and one of our team members was invited as a guest speaker along with professor Oscar Kuipers, head of the department of Molecular Genetics and main advisor of the iGEM Groningen team.

The third guest speaker was Sjoerd van der Meulen an iGEM Groningen 2008 team member and employee of Bioclear, a company which provides biological solutions for soil, energy and environment.