Bringing synthetic biology and the iGEM projects in contact with the public is a relevant part of the iGEM competition. In order to reach new interested groups, we dedicated in many activities to spread our public outreach. Among other things we co-hosted the CeBiTec pupils academy, published a german homepage, presented our project at a scientific symposium and the public ceremony of NRW day 2016, designed a postcard regarding synthetic biology and had close communication with media and press, including a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Bielefeld has a strong collective of mid-sized companies, including certain innovative and young start-ups from different industries. At March 13th iGEM Bielefeld-CeBiTec was invited to the 13th Bielefelder "Mittelstandsforum" (Link to German program: http://www.wege-bielefeld.de/newsletter/Mittelstandsforum-2016.pdf). The annual event is a meetup for people from economy, research and politics. Under the slogan "We back on special ideas" ("Wir setzen auf besondere Ideen") young entrepreneurs and academics were encouraged to present their business and projects. Together with members from iGEM Bielefeld-CeBiTec 2015 we had the chance to represent iGEM and Bielefeld University. This was a great opportunity to tell people about the iGEM competition and our projects. Afterwards, there was time for further conversations and discussions with the visitors. We could earn some useful tips, especially for entrepreneur and marketing aspects of our project. We used it, to expend our contacts to local business, partly leading to an active long-term exchange between iGEM and public. These advices became very useful during our project development. Moreover, we relied on these new contacts to address several issues.

From July 4th to 6th we had the chance to present our project to scientific audience from all over Germany and Europe at the 11th CeBiTec symposium (Link: http://www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/index.php/events/conferences/459-2016-04-07-11th-cebitec-symposium). The conference with the topic "Microbial Genomics and Metagenomics in Human Health and Disease" occurs at the "Center of Interdisciplinary Research" of Bielefeld University. Among many interesting lectures and workshops, there was a poster session and much time for the scientific exchange. We were proud to have the opportunity to show our newly designed poster (Fig. …….) to many interested visitors. Participating experts from the field of biology and medicine provided us with a lot of useful tips and their opinions about our project.

At June 1st we had an information point in the Bielefeld University and sold delicious waffles! Lots of people came around to talk with us about our project and about iGEM and of course for eating waffles. Thereby we had the chance to give students and graduates of all kinds of courses an insight into synthetic biology. If you missed us and our excellent waffles, don’t be sad. Come and visit us on our home coming stand on November 21st at the Bielefeld University main hall!