Team:TAU Israel/Public Engagement

 

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Bioinformatics Work Model Software

Throughout the past year, we aimed to inspire the public about the potential of synthetic biology to solve world problems and the potential of our iGEM project to help fighting antibiotic resistant bacteria. Furthermore, we believe that we should raise the public's awareness to this global issue of antibiotic resistance and pass the important message of right usage of antibiotics. For that purpose, we gave a number of lectures at various events and conferences throughout the year.

ISMBE 2019 Haifa

On February 25-26th, 2019 the annual meeting of the Israeli Medical and Biological Engineering Society (ISMBE) took place in Haifa's Congress Center. This conference provides a unique meeting place for the leading biomedical engineering scientists, from Israel and abroad, medical doctors and industry leaders, presenting their latest scientific and technological advances. The conference included a few sessions and we, iGEM TAU 2019, had a presentation at the synthetic biology session! First, we presented the iGEM organization and competition to the audience and then, the problem we choose to deal with - antibiotic resistance. We presented the general idea of our project and got very good feedback about the idea!

ISMBE 2019 Website

Science at the bar - Haifa Health Talks

"Science at the Bar" nights are an excellent and successful tool to promote science and knowledge among the public and students. We gave a lecture as part of Haifa Health Talks, at a local pub in the Technion, which is called "Junta". The event was held in collaboration with Carmel Hospital and focused on ways to deal with resistant bacteria. Through the lecture, the audience was introduced to the synthetic biology world, the antibiotic resistance problem and our solution - PYO PYO.
The audience consisted of students, PhD's and the general public. The event was open to everyone. After the event ended, a lot of people came and asked us a lot of questions. An important question that was raised was the delivery tool of our pyocins, which are proteins complexes, and as we all know, proteins are not resistant to the acidity in the digestive system. We brought it out for discussion in our weekly group meeting and came up with two ideas. The first, to make a special capsule that will contain the pyocins and protect them from the acidity. The second, to transfer the pyocins to the infected area as an ointment that you need to apply on the relevant area. A lot of people from the audience were very impressed and thanked us for a fascinating lecture.

Facebook Event

Researchers' Night

The European Researchers' Night is one of the biggest public events dedicated to bringing researchers closer to the public. This night is taking place all over Europe at the same time, in more than 300 different cities. This night showcases the diversity of research and highlights the impact of research on our daily lives. The aim is also to motivate young people to embark on research careers. The events promote how researchers contribute to our society by displaying their work in an interactive and engaging forum.
On September 19th, Israel's Researchers' Night took place in Tel-Aviv University with 10,000 visitors all over the campus. 150 people registered for a special lecture of the iGEM TAU 2019 Team! We lectured under the title of "How To Fight In Antibiotic Resistance? An experimental lecture about the DNA world". First, we talked with the kids generally about the meaning of living creatures and basic life units - the cells. Later, we talked about bacteria, antibiotics, the global problem of antibiotic resistance and what genetic engineering is.
The highlight of this lecture for the kids was the DNA experiment we performed with the help of some children volunteers, in order to extract the DNA of strawberries - touch and feel it. Later in the lecture, we explained about iGEM and presented our solution to the antibiotic resistance problem - the PYO PYO project.
At this event, we delivered to parents and children the message of proper use of antibiotics to prevent the development of antibiotic resistance and verify their understanding with a nice little quiz.
Pictures by @Yael Zur

Newsletter

Since we started to do our biological experiments in the wet lab, we decided to publish every month our progress and updates of the different things we were working on. Our distribution list included our sponsors and everyone that registered through our website. In this way, we kept everyone updated in our progress with bioinformatics work, diffusion model, HP and wet lab experiments.
The links to our monthly newsletters:
May
June
July
August
September

Media and University Presentations

As we started this project and chose our topic, we opened Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, which we kept updated during the year. We updated every social event we had and participated in an Instagram challenge (mentioned in Collobaration Page). In addition, our project was exposed to the public via articles that were published in the University's website. One article, written by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinfotmatics, which are part of our sponsors.
Another article was written about our meeting with Prof. Christopher Voigt of MIT, who visited TAU and was publisehd in the TAU English website.
Our sponsors - BioAnalytics published us in their Website and LinkedIn.
In addition, we presented our work as a poster in the "Projects Day" for graduating students of the Engineering Faculty and on another occasion at a Computer Science conference of the Tel Aviv University. A lot of visitors and researchers from the faculty were interested in our project and gave us constructive criticism and remarks.