Team:UNITS Trieste/Outreach

As mentioned before, this was the first time our University took part to the iGEM competition, and our first task was to throw ourselves into a deep study of synthetic biology. We soon realized how many implications this field could have and for this reason we decided also to take a good care of the spread of its knowledge toward the society.
As we are a small group we decided to maximize our efforts, choosing to put in practice our will not only taking part to important events during the summer but also setting up events in order to give continuity to our work next year.

The first event we took part in was Uni-Village, a two-day event in the University main campus.
Among talks, exhibitions and music we introduced for the first time the iGEM competition and the team. There, talking about synthetic biology for the first time, we got the opportunity to collect the impressions of a heterogeneous group of students belonging to different faculties.
This event was fundamental to understand what people know and perceive about synthetic biology, what they want to know and what they are afraid of.

We spent almost all the time we had, got the first data and first satisfactions... All these experiences were reported at the opening night of the Science Café 2011/2012 edition held in the historical Caffè S. Marco, founded in 1914. This initiative is organized monthly by the University of Trieste to explain in a simple way to a wide audience some of the most interesting scientific advances.
We performed a presentation especially for this occasion. Our aim was to make small steps using comparisons and daily situations to explain what SynBio is, what could be its implications and talking about our Synbiome and its applications.

The UNITS_Trieste iGEM team will take part to the Resercher’s Night (23th September). This occurrence is promoted by the European Commission and will be held in 320 European cities. We will be hosted by the Bacteriology Lab (V. Venturi - ICGEB) and our stand will be located in the heart of the city, in the world largest square on the seaside (Piazza Unità D'Italia).
We will have the opportunity to talk with a lot of people of all ages. Instead of a "symposium style" talk we want to discuss in a friendly way to make people more at ease. We are also planning to prepare practical and highly visual activities with bacteria.

As it is our first attendance we had to start everything from scratch... It was difficult but also highly rewarding! We hope there will be a continuation in the next years, and to encourage this we planned with our professors to organize during the next semester a short course dedicated to iGEM and SynBio named "Short course in Sinthetic Biology: looking forward iGEM 2012".
We want to give a general overview of the subject inviting speakers (researchers and students) from abroad and, more specifically, explain our project, what were the problems, what was the solution and what we learned from it.
Also, a part dedicated to practical skills to face the competition could be useful.

Being our first participation, this was also our first approach to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, and we felt it was not so friendly to consult at first sight. We’ve had some difficulties looking for BioBricks specification and characterization and so, taking in example the page of BBa_K274210, we had the idea to collect all the information about a BioBrick inside the same document, as a Data Sheet, pratical and easier to share. Following this way we decided to generate a standard free form for BioBrick Data Sheet generation. It would also have been much convenient if this idea came earlier, in order to generate a form available for all the teams participating to iGEM 2011. We decided to make use of this form for the submission of all our BioBricks, and hope that this tool could be helpful to other teams and get widespread use in the next iGEM competitions.
Click on the pdf icon above to download the form!