Team:IISER-Pune-India/Public Engagement

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Public Engagement and Education

Our team made several approaches in order to bring the ideas of synthetic biology to local communities and also to involve the ideas brought up in these activities in our project. Here is a brief overview of all the efforts undertaken by our team, along with the rationale behind them and our takeaways from the different experiences, chronologically:

Session for High-School and College Students Session-cum-Workshop for underprivileged middle-school students iGEM Club, IISER Pune Survey and Discussions

Rationale behind Session:

Our team wanted to gague the interests and knowledge of High-School and 1^st year college students on the subject of Synthetic Biology. We also wanted to check the interest of these students in our idea.

Our students!

The Session:

Members of our team took a 2 day session in a school in the town Berhampore, which is located in West Bengal. Basics of Synthetic biology, e.coli gene editing and some other achievements of synthetic biology especially genetic engineering were discussed with those students. For more information on the topics covered, please take a look at the session description in this website(which includes the ppt used).

The Session

Our Takeaways:

In our session, we found out that despite the obvious interest of the students in Synthetic Biology, very few had even heard of any of its concepts before. This shows a lack of proper courses on synthetic biology in the Indian education curriculum. The students also seemed highly interested in our project and its applications, which provided us with confidence to move forwards with our project.

Rationale behind Session:

To bring the concepts of Synthetic Biology to all facets of the society, we decided to organize a short session followed by a workshop on Synthetic Biology for the underprivileged kids belonging to neighbouring schools. These kids were part of an education program organized by Disha, the Social Initiatives club of IISER Pune, called SNP(Science Nurture Program) where the students are taught to think about problems scientifically.

The team and the kids!

The Session:

We tried to take the session in such a way, as to expose the minds of the children to the world of Synthetic Biology and show them how it could change peoples lives. We showed several iGEM projects to the kids as examples of how people use the powers of synthetic biology to create devices, which could help us all. Also, we gave the kids an idea about how such projects are carried out, using both experiments and simulations.

This was followed by the workshop, in which we taught the children about bacterial colonies and ways of creating them in plates. Then, we gave the children plates and asked them to create colonies using whatever source they wanted to.

The children used several creative techniques for getting bacteria into their plates. Some of these included coughing into the plates, exposing the plates to air for some time, putting dirty water on the plates, touching the plates and putting hair strands on the plates. All of these strategies worked from moderate to high success, as can be seen in the figure below.

Our Takeaways:

At the end of the session, we asked the children about how they would use Synthetic Biology to alter their lives. There were several interesting responses. Some of the children talked about curing diseases, and some of them talked about using it to create. However, one of their answers intrigued us. One of the students talked about using bacteria to clean up the environment, especially the dirty water flowing near her home. She was talking about the Mula Mutha river, which flows through Pune and is severely polluted. This answer and the previous suggestion given to us in the Mindspark session convinced us that cleaning the river was very important for the people in Pune. The session was a success with everyone participating, including us, learning something new. We vowed to take whatever we learnt to set our priorities straight, focussing on what was actually important for the people, cleaning the river.

Creation of iGEM club:

The members of our team, with help from the 2017 and 2015 IISER Pune iGEM teams, created an iGEM club for the students of IISER Pune.

Welcome to iGEM club!

An orientation session was held for all students in which members of the current and previous teams spoke about what iGEM was and how students could participate in it. We all shared our experiences and encouraged people to come together and brainstorm for new ideas which could form future iGEM projects. We also focussed on the interdisciplinary nature of iGEM and encouraged people from different disciplines to come together.

Rationale behind formation of club:

While working on the project, our team members realized that a lot more time could be devoted towards experimentation and creation of parts if the brainstorming for ideas was done beforehand. Hence, the club was formed to bring interested people together who could start thinking about ideas. Also, the club gave interested members a chance to help the current iGEM team(in photography, videography etc.)

Survey regarding river pollution

We conducted a survey regarding river pollution in different parts of our city, Pune. We visited various settlements around the rivers Mula and Mutha and interacted with the local people. We prepared a questionaire and survey form regarding river pollution and how it affects the common public. We asked people questions and made them fill our survey form. We reached 49 families from different parts of the city. There were people from different a variety of fields and occupations including fishermen, industrialists, farmers etc. This gave us insights into the effects of river pollution in common peoples' day to day lives. Here are some of the questions and responses of the survey:

Graph showing responses of people about how polluted they think the river near their surrounding is

The above graph suggest that most people feel that the rivers around them are highly polluted.

Graph showing responses of people about the effects of river in their lives

The above graph suggest that rivers affect most people's daily life to a good extent.

Graph showing responses of people about the necessity river clean-up

The above graph suggest that most people think that there is an urgent need to clean-up the rivers.

Here are some of the major issues regarding river pollution that people reported in two different parts of the city:

Area : Mundhwa

1. 1. People mostly complained of the smell and mosquitoes. We saw the drainage line was directly opened on the river bank and the sewage was directly let into the river without treatment
2. 2. There were also cases of skin rashes and allergies from the water. We saw that solid waste was thrown in the water, clothes were washed in the river and Buffaloes and pigs were wading in the river.
3. 3. The fishermen community told us that no good fish were available in the river from many years past.

Area : Sainat Nagar

1. 1. The major cause of problem was serious mosquito infestation that was using the river water as breeding grounds.
2. 2. The level of infestation was the highest recorded in the past few years. This caused unusually high number of dengue and malaria cases - many people and children were affected.
3. 3. These mosquito levels were a direct result of the stagnation of river water, increased by the growth of water hyacinth.
4. 4. The main reason cited for this was the jackwell project built down river - a kind of reservation - to provide water in rural areas.

The survey clearly tells us that the common public gets affected adversely due to metal pollution of rivers. This survey was a very important part of our project which inspired us the most for developing a tool for metal bioremediation of river water.

Here are pictures of some of the survey forms:

Here is a pdf of the some survey forms: