Team:Leiden/HP/Silver

Public Engagement

Events

Synthetic biology has the purpose to design useful organisms or biological systems. But how could something be useful when people do not know about it, or are even doubtful or scared of it? That’s why our team found it really important to spread the word about synthetic biology and engage with the public, other scientists, business and national institutions which not only a good break from working in the lab but also highly motivating to do. At these events we displayed a poster to summarize our project, which won the "Best Poster" prize at the International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation !

May 28th 2016 - Night at the Museum

Considering the extraordinary amount of culture and history in Leiden, the city is stacked with museums. There is a museum of natural history, a museum with art from the Dutch Golden Age and even a museum which is centered around the human body. Lots of people come to visit these museums every year, and students are given free acces. But there is on one special annual event which connects all of them; the Night at the Museums. Every year, a group of students organises the Night at the Museums. Here, the museums stay open until after midnight, and each museum is a host for countless activities. We, iGEM Leiden, had the honour to entertain and enlighten visitors in the city’s old orrery.

Our main act, was letting visitors create bio-art. Bio-art, being the beautiful patterns one can form by letting colonies of coloured bacteria grow on petri-dishes. Aside from our main act, we conducted surveys. These surveys gauged how people view synthetic biology and its applications. Furthermore, we also exhibited the machine that simulates zero gravity for our organisms. There was also a homemade laser projection- microscope. This microscope allowed people to see microbes move around in a drop of water. To top it all off, we told everybody about our fantastic project and how we hope to help with the colonisation of Mars.

August 16th 2016 - Culture Carousel Introductory Week

Each year, thousands of new students arrive in Leiden. Each and every student has to find his/her place in this city, aside from getting used to studying. To make everyone feel at home, there is an introductory week in Leiden to help people fit in. During this week, students are put into groups together. Each group contains students from at least two different -and often completely opposite- studies. An example is Physics and Psychology. These groups tour around Leiden, doing all kinds of fun activities, like canoeing, partying and board games. There is also a batch of Cultural activities taking place in the ‘Van Der Werf’ park. We were invited to perform during this carousel of activities. We will mainly make bio-art with people, like we did during Night at the Museums.

August 16th - 18th, 2016 - IWBDA Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

The eighth international Workshop on Bio-design Automation brings together researchers from the synthetic biology, systems biology, and design automation communities. This year Newcastle upon Tine was the host city or this event. During several sessions and presentations different aspects of the field of synthetic biology and the efforts to create computer-aided design tools addressing synthetic biology's specific design needs were being discussed. Four members of our team got the chance to take place in this community and learn from the design automation community. We were allowed to present our project to the audience and show our scientific poster. Besides a lot of interesting questions and advices, we even received a prize for best poster.

September 17th - Night of Art and Knowledge

The Night of Art and Knowledge was quite similar to the Night at the Museums, but even much bigger. However, this night fitted our science related topic better. This night was another opportunity to spread the news of our project and about synthetic Biology. So right between the amazing knife collections in the National Museum of History, we stalled out our plate stacks of bacteria in beautiful colors and more than 400 agar-plates where people could make their own bacterial art while being talked to about the most fascinating synthetic biology topics, including our mission to Mars. This was also again a great opportunity to ask people their opinion on this field and genetic modification - so that’s why we also conducted surveys, just as the ones we did for the pilot study at the Night of the Museum. Thereby, visitors got the chance to fire our team with interesting questions regarding our project, which we were more than happy to answer and the Random Positioning Machine was rotating again with garden cress - because who doesn’t want to know what microgravity does to small organisms?

Overall, the night was very successful and reactions from all around us were filled with joy and excitement. Just to see everyone create artwork with living organisms instead of paper and pencil and to get people excited about Synthetic Biology and the iGEM competition is amazing. This night we brought our mission to Mars a little bit closer again and reached for the stars.

September 20th - Safe by Design conference

The National Institute for Public Health invited us to get engaged with them on the topic of Safe by Design. In a series of meetings and finally this public conference, the issues regarding safety and thereby necessary regulations in this highly new field of science were explored together with the other iGEM teams from the Netherlands. Much more on this topic and the results of these sessions can be found at our Safe by Design page ./p>

Oktober 17th 2016 - Performance @ The Museon

The Museon in The Hague is a popular scientific museum. They are currently building a new permanent exhibition, called One World, where the hot topics in science should also be included. We approached the museum to ask whether they were planning to include the promising field of synthetic biology, and whether we could contribute to this. Since building a museum exhibit isn’t something that can be achieved in a couple of months - let alone be financed - we decided together to organize a public lecture on this topic instead. Whereas doctor Bertus Beaumont from TU Delft told all about the techniques and approaches involved in this highly new field of science, we are allowed to inspire the public with the broad variety of applications, mostly focussing on one of the hottest-topics right now: space exploration.

Other outreach activities

Photo Comics

The Dutch photo comic maker Ype Driessen did a great job in designing a bacterial comic for us, which we made in fluorescent bioart! Besides, he also made a Dutch photo comic on our project! Images are published with permission of fotostrips.nl!

(c) Ype Driessen

First ever comic created with bacteria!

Printed and online publications

Besides organizing and attending events to engage with the public, we got into contact with people via different media. One of the highlights in this is writing a blog for the American synthetic DNA company Twist Bioscience, proud sponsor of the iGEM competition! Various publications are listed below.

We wrote a blog for Twist Bioscience: Synbio in Space!

We got the opportunity to write a blog for this American company! Just before we announced our project to the world, the American synthetic DNA company Twist Bioscience published a blog on ‘What if synthetic biology was available to The Martian’s botanist Mark Watney’ , which coincidently described a part of the project we were about to reveal! At the IWBDA2016 in Newcastle upon Tyne, we met – another coincidence – the enthusiastic author of this blog, and got the chance to write a follow-up blog on space synthetic biology!

So what challenges will synthetic biology solve for us when we’re colonizing our solar system? Read our blog: How on Earth will we colonize Mars? Use synthetic biology!

“In a recent lecture on Mars colonization, Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors said, “I think that Mars is gonna be a great place to go. It will be the planet of opportunity.” Mankind’s first mission to Mars is getting ever closer - SpaceX hopes to get there by 2022. Extraterrestrial colonization is a challenge worth rising to, but getting to Mars is only a small part of the equation…”

Read on at: https://www.twistbioscience.com/colonize-mars-use-synthetic-biology - we hope you will enjoy it! Special thanks to Adam Thomas for helping us to compose this blog and to Twist Bioscience for this opportunity!

Pilot Study Questionnaire

Introduction

What do people think about iGEM? Or synthetic biology? And what if we mention GMOs? In order to enthuse others for iGEM, without scaring them of genetic manipulation, we have to assess the public opinion on synthetic biology. To this end, we performed a survey that would pose questions about the various aspects of this research area, including: medical, agricultural and sustainable fuel applications.

Proper study design requires us to first evaluate the effectiveness of our survey in answering our research question on a small group: a pilot study. Therefore, we handed out our survey at the Museumnacht, about which you can read more here: Museumnacht

Results

In the pilot study, we found that opinions on synthetic biology depend on the intended application. While most people strongly support the use of synthetic biology for medical and biofuel applications, opinions on its use in agriculture were more varied. Nevertheless, the practical examples of applications were all received positively by most interviewees.

Our pilot also showed a trend towards a slightly more positive view on synthetic biology by male interviewees. No trend was observed for different age groups or level of education. However, the number of observations in the pilot study was small (n=22), so perhaps the actual survey will reveal significant differences.

Recursively subtracted principal component analysis (RSPCA) of the survey questions. This figure shows the highest variance in the data found in when reducing the 11 questions to a 2-dimensional plot. The grey arrows indicate the direction of the original questions in the new dimensions. For example, question 5, 7 and 11 all ask about dangers or negative consequences and therefore point in the same direction in the new space. Likewise, the positive questions point in the opposing direction. The blue dots each represent a survey of the "Synthetic Biology" version. Likewise, the red dots each represent a survey of the "GMO" version.

Our hypothesis was that the word "GMO" has received a lot of negative attention over the years and may therefore influence the public's opinion. However, no clear trend was observed towards a different opinion of the "GMO" and "Synthetic Biology" versions, which consistently used only one of these phrasings.

Though the figure provides a quick insight in 11 questions on 99 surveys, it is far from ideal. Questions were answered in sliders, yielding percentage outcomes. Since percentages are not expected to follow a normal distribution, PCA is not the most informative tool. Therefore, we also tested the effect of version on the percentages using beta regression for each question (percentages can be reasonably approximated with a beta distribution). The effect was not significant in any of the questions, so we conclude the use of either phrasing has little to no effect on survey outcome.

Since surveys are rarely completely filled in for all cases, the question arises of how to deal with missing values. A simple, albeit biased approach would be to omit incomplete surveys or impute the missing values. We opted for a more advanced approach described in Taylor et al. 2013.

References:

• Francisco Cribari-Neto, Achim Zeileis (2010). Beta Regression in R. Journal of Statistical Software 34(2), 1-24. URL http://www.jstatsoft.org/v34/i02/.
• Taylor, M.H., Losch, M., Wenzel, M., Schröter, J., 2013. On the Sensitivity of Field Reconstruction and Prediction Using Empirical Orthogonal Functions Derived from Gappy Data. J. Climate, 26, 9194-9205. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00089.1.

Mare: Gardening life on Mars

The weekly newspaper of Leiden University ‘Mare’ did an interview and wrote an elaborate piece on our project! It really provides a nice illustration of the science behind and implementations of our project, and can be found at: http://www.mareonline.nl/archive/2016/05/25/gardening-life-on-mars

PLOS Synbio blog: Colonising Mars with E. coli via Leiden iGEM 2016

PLOS synbio has published blogs on various iGEM projects, and our project was one of the first! http://blogs.plos.org/synbio/2016/04/27/igem-blogs-colonising-mars-with-e-coli-via-leiden-igem-2016/

Radio performances

We’ve been on the radio four times during our project. Although it’s in Dutch, it might be fun to listen to! Two of our performances are listed below:

http://sleutelstad.nl/2016/08/24/afrikastudies-verliefd-op-lowlands-en-planten-op-mars/
http://sleutelstad.nl/2016/05/18/zingende-zebravinken-biotechnologie-op-mars-en-veel-wetenschapsnieuws/

TV performance

We even had a short item on the Dutch TV, watch it below!