British Science Week (BSW) is a celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths - Manchester was chosen as this year’s European City of Science, because of this, the University of Manchester held the British Science Week in order to inspire the next generation of scientists. As our first outreach activity, our team decided to take part by setting up a stall aimed at increasing the awareness of different methods in the production of chemicals. We taught the primary school children that scented compounds could be produced through conventional farming, synthetic biology (GM) and through synthetic chemistry. We also discussed the benefits and drawbacks of each method of production in order for the school pupils to make their own minds up about which method was preferable.

This event gave us some first hand experience with answering questions and the public reception related to synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry, in industrial production.

A group of team members attended the conference and took part in a poster presentation session where they gained positive feedback and criticism of our project. Afterwards, the team then presented our project to a room of microbiology society members and answered their questions about how certain elements of the mechanism functioned. We used the feedback to continue researching and revising our Ethanol Biosensor and the different mechanisms we could use.

One suggestion we had was to try metabolites other than Ethanol, we researched into this and found that we could use glucose in place of Ethanol. This was because a simple change from alcohol oxidase to glucose oxidase would be needed for the cell free mechanism to detect glucose instead. This would also allow for us to produce preliminary data that could be used by future iGEM teams and for our own patches’ testing and modelling.

Another suggestion which was made was that we could make our ethanol biosensor into a “funky colour changing tattoo” (Glasglow Team, 2015). After some market research, we found an article about a research group from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) who had “developed a new tattoo-based wearable alcohol sensor” (Jayoung Kim, PhD. quoted from qz.com) which measures ethanol concentration in sweat electronically. In order to solve the problem of consumers sweating at different rates, the Californian researchers built the device to “[deliver] a drug called pilocarpine, which generates sweat on the surface of the skin”. This was a problem we had also encountered and the potential of using pilocarpine has now been highlighted to us if we were to produce the ‘Alcopatch’ in the future.

The whole team went to the EuroScience Open Forum held in Manchester. This was a chance to share our project with researchers from around the world. We were asked numerous times to explain our project which gave our team practice before the UK Meet Up. Researchers commended us for the exploration of two different mechanisms but also raised the concerns for the marketing of the ‘Alcopatch’. This was due to the public perception of GMOs as well as the worry of the Alcopatch being marketed to the wrong people who might use it more as a game.

We also went to a talk about biotechnology and the progression of scientific research within today’s society. This ended with a discussion about multidisciplinary research. Our team contributed by talking about how our experience of iGEM has been multidisciplinary. Our team believed how good it was to have a variety of people being able to contribute their own talent to form an equally driven team. The majority of the attendees agreed, but referred to the difficulties of explaining to different members of a multidisciplinary team what each other are actually doing. Our own team also had these issues too with regards to modelling. This is why we decided to meet up with a PhD student and our modellers for an ‘Ensemble Modelling Crash Course’.