Team:Edinburgh OG/Public Engagement

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Public Engagement

Remedye as well took a proactive role to present the project in diverse synthetic biology events. In July, Remedye team members traveled to Newcastle to exhibit our poster in the Designer Biology Symposium 2019. Further than presenting our project and looking for feedback, we took advantage for networking with other iGEM teams. We worked together with the Manchester iGEM team ‘Cutiful’ to gather key information from the public perception through specialized surveys.

We were extremely pleased to present the project at the prestigious SynBioBeta conference in October 2019. We had the opportunity to showcase our project in the digital poster session. We received positive feedback from many attendants and we were glad to exchange words with leading synthetic biology companies in the biomaterials field as Spiber. Spiber exhibit at Synbiobeta the 100% Synthetic silk jacket 'Moon Parka' in collaboration with North Face. Having the opportunity to touch the real fibers of brewed synthetic silk was a very inspirational moment. Finally, we meet iGEM Ambassador and ex-University of Edinburgh iGEM member Camilo Chavez. He was eager to unite the synthetic biology community and encouraging people like us to take further steps as bioentrepreneurs to keep impacting the world positively.

Team "Domain" (St Andrew's) On 28th Jun we welcomed team St Andrews and co-hosted a meeting with them. During the meeting we communicated on aspects such as protein modeling, public engagement and lab work. It has been really helpful to share our experience at an early stage of the projects. We then participated in team St. Andrews outreach project ‘Microbiome of Britain’, which carried out in Edinburgh. This resulted in a session of volunteer work at Edinburgh Zoo. We helped team St Andrews to run activities at the zoo for an afternoon, whilst also helped to collect soil sample to be ran as part of their project.

Team "Cutiful" (Manchester) We were glad to share research interest with team Manchester since their projects are both related to dye. We shared our references related to current dye waste situation and bioremediation method. We also gave them feedback with the survey they developed in their project. We were able to add some of our own questions to the survey, which was intended to gauge the public feeling on their project and the general attitude towards their project. As both projects concered dye, this was a great opportunity to understand the public perceptions of synthetic biology as it related to our project. Of the people we surveyed 47.46% wanted dyes that were more environmentally friendly, 66.4% were concerned to very concerned about the pollution caused by dyes and 60.66% of those surveyed would pay extra for more environmentally friendly clothes. This show that some people are aware of the problem caused by dyes and the textile industry and want their consumption to be more environmentally friendly. This also shows there is a business incentive for making the textile production process a more sustainable one as it could generate even more profit!