Team:BGU Israel/Public Engagement
W e have met and hosted High School students of The Jusidman Science Center for Youth, told them about the importance of synthetic biology and presented our "Trojan Mosquito" project. A major aim of the center is to expose high school students to the academic world and offer different academic programs. We explained which tools we use and gave a tour in our lab to demonstrate different lab methods and materials that we use in our research.
W e also met with the Environmental Department of the city of Be'er-Sheva and with a representative of Tamar Regional Council (the Dead-Sea regional council). We presented our project and learned the authority approach to the mosquito problem both in urban and in rural habitats, and about the ways they "measure" it, public complaints for example. They were both open to the idea of a pilot in a defined radius and a future collaboration.
Below you can read the full summary of our various activities.
Jusidman Science Center for Youth
Engaging High School Students of The Jusidman Science Center for Youth to Synthetic Biology and to our "FlyGEM- The Trojan Mosquito" Project
Jusidman is a leading center for science education and imparts knowledge and research learning and skills. A major aim of the Jusidman Science Center for Youth at the Ben Gurion University is to expose high school kids to the academic world and offer different academic programs.
We took part in two different events at the center.
June 30th, 2019- We gave a lecture to the Alpha Scientific Research Program high school students.
Alpha Scientific Research Program is an innovative program for gifted and outstanding students in secondary education (9th graders) that allows these students to integrate into the world of contemporary scientific research. As part of the program, students write a research paper.
Our lecture included background about synthetic biology with a specification on our project. We explained our research to the kids, which tools we used and showed them the results we had in our project. We also answered questions that the kids had regarding our project and procedures and discussed with the students the ethical problems that could arise after learning about our project.
July 9th, 2019- We presented our iGEM project and gave a tour in our lab.
The lecture and the tour were for students in the beginning of Alpha Scientific Research Program. We discussed with them the importance of biology and what makes a good research.
We also presented our project and our workspace at the lab. We demonstrated different lab methods, materials and tools that we use in our research. The students asked questions and showed a lot of interest in science and in our research.
Parasitology Conference
Parasitology Conference held at Kfar HaMaccabiah, Israel
On December 12th, 2018, the annual conference of ISPPTD (Israel Society for Parasitology, Protozoology and Tropical Diseases) took place at Kfar HaMaccabiah, Ramat-Gan, Israel. On the month before the conference, we decided as a team that our project will involve biological pest control of mosquitoes. We went to the conference in order to understand what species will be easier to work with and we wanted to hear what are the trending topics in the field. We were lucky to hear the 2009 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Prof. Ada Yonath, talking about her discoveries. In the conference, we spoke to Prof. Alon Warburg from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. We discussed with him the option of creating transgenic Phlebotomus papatasi mosquitoes, but Prof. Warburg suggested we try a different approach due to our time limitation, and also due to the small number of facilities in the world that can enable insects engineering. This led us to reconsider the mosquito we would work with.
Synthetic Biology Conference
Synthetic Biology Conference held at the Weizmann Institute of Science
The 2nd Israeli Synthetic Biology Conference was held at the Weizmann Institute, and was organized by Yonathan Chemla, a PhD student in our Primary PI’s lab (where we carry out our experiments). At this conference, we learned about the importance of synthetic biology and were familiarized with different projects in the field. We also had the opportunity to present our initial poster describing our project.
In order to stand out and attract attention, we designed special T-shirts, which brought interest to the project and to the iGEM competition.
Other iGEM teams also attended the meeting, they have sent representatives to the conference and we started planning collaborations with them.
