Team:EPFL/SummerSchool

Education
and Public
Engagment

One Pot Tutorial

The tutorial

In order to promote the use of our custom OnePot PURE cell-free system, we have filmed and edited a tutorial detailing the necessary procedure. It involves the buffer preparation, the energy solution, the protein solution, and the ribosome solution. However, the ribosome preparation is not shown in the tutorial.
We believe this will promote the use of synthetic biology and cell-free systems in high schools and universities around the world, making it more accessible and understandable.

Summer School Teaching

The event

Every year, EPFL organize a Summer School program for high school students from Könitz, near Bern in Switzerland. During one week they discover our campus, the facilities and laboratories, as well as the research, conducted. The 4th of July, we had the opportunity to integrate synthetic biology into this program by teaching them about the iGEM competition, presenting our project and guiding them to perform three experiments related to it.

The experiments

The experiments were based on Biobits Explorer1, we adapted them to fit with our project. We started by expressing sfGFP into OnePot PURE which allowed us to teach them about protein expression, as well as cell-free systems. Then, we isolated DNA from banana and strawberry, this simple experiment taught them about DNA and cell lysis. The last experiment was to amplify the banana DNA by RPA, they learned how DNA amplification works and how RPA differs from PCR.

The outcome

The feedback was very positive, the students were happy to have some independence in their experiments and to observe fluorescent proteins. It was also an enriching experience for us, as it was our first time working as a team and performing in front of an audience. It highlighted our strength and areas of improvement in presentation skills.

EPFL Open Doors

The event

The 14th and 15th of September, EPFL held an open house on campus to celebrate the school's 50th anniversary. The visitors could visit stands, attend talks and participate in workshops.

Our contribution

As an iGEM team, we presented our project to the public. It was an amazing experience for us as we learned to adapt our speech according to the person's knowledge in biology. Overall, we had very good feedback. The people were interested in our project, as it targets a specific problem: grapevine diseases. They understood how our solution could be applicable in the field and many suggested we turned our project into a startup.

Further Presentation

The end of the Jamboree doesn’t mean the end of iGEM for our team. We are scheduled to present our projects in future occasions

EPFL Presentation - October 25th

Before flying to Boston we will present our project in our university EPFL. It is an major event for us as it will be the first official presentation. We will be able to practice it and receive honest feedback from other students and professors. In addition to that, it promotes iGEM in EPFL and will hopefully inspire other students to be part of the future team.

Swissnex - October 5th

Swissnex is a Swiss scientific network located all around the world. Swissnex Boston contacted all the iGEM swiss teams (ETH Zurich, UZurich, UniGE and ourselves )to present their project. It is a big opportunity for our team as it will allow us to create a network of investors and possibly continue our project if we want to make a startup out of it.

High schoolers information days - November 20th and 21st

EPFL organizes two information days dedicated to high schoolers. They will have the opportunity to discover the different study fields that our university has to offer, which will guide them to make their choice. We will present the competition iGEM, introduce them to synthetic biology and explain our project, hoping it will inspire these young minds to participate to it in the future.

References

1 A.Huang et al., 2018 BioBits™ Explorer: A modular synthetic biology education kit, Science Advances, [link to article]