Human Practices

Talking to experts

We talked with different experts from universities and research centers in the field of biology, genetic engineering, biological modeling and cyanobacterial research. Many of these experts gave us much appreciated information and new aspects to our ideas that have guided our project towards what it is today. As this valuable information gained from the experts has affected the design of our project significantly we are presenting it more deeply in integrated human practices section.

Finnish Environment Institute SYKE

In order to gain more insight into how big problem cyanobacteria in Finland is, we contacted the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. They guided us to the Finnish Environment Institute (Suomen ympäristökeskus, SYKE), where we got to discuss about the cyanobacteria problem and our project with some experts of the field.

We talked to Jari Silander, Senior Research Scientist specializing in monitoring and cost-benefit analysis, and Juhani Kettunen, Program Director responsible for modernization of environmental monitoring activities. We introduced our project and briefly talked about synthetic biology. They found our approach interesting and promising since they have been trying to deal with the blue-green algae problem for many years now. They described the full extent of algae detection problem in Finland and all the strategies used in the past and at the moment to deal with it both in research and industry.

They also discussed with us the business aspects of our project and gave us good advice on how to build our business strategy if we are to bring our algae detection and degradation methods to masses.

Meetings with companies

As we were looking for funding, contacting different companies and organizations, we got a chance to visit a few, tell about our project, discuss about synthetic biology and use of biotechnology in Finland. We talked with ThermoFisher, Algol and LAL (Luonnontieteiden akateemisten liitto) and they showed great interest in our project and helped us with the funding. ThermoFisher was quite generous to even send us different lab kits for different purposes. We will visit some of them to give the final presentation about our achievements after we return from Boston.

Interviewing people on the streets of Helsinki

We decided to make a little survey on the streets of Helsinki. The goal was to find out what people actually knew about synthetic biology and cyanobacteria. We wanted to see what kind of need there was for informing the general public about all the possibilities synthetic biology offers, as well as, from our project’s point of view, the need to inform about the dangers of cyanobacteria. The interview can be viewed below with subtitles in English. It seemed that the general conception of synthetic biology was something quite foreign and that there is a need for raising awareness of the hazards of cyanobacteria.

LUMA centre

We met some high school students who were candidates for the Finnish team of the International Biology Olympiad. Our team gave them a presentation about our project and synthetic biology. The students got to design their own little iGEM projects and hopefully learned about molecular biology and synthetic biology. They also asked questions about our studies and how one needs to prepare oneself to study them. Hopefully we were able to inspire them to continue with the biological studies in the future and perhaps even try themselves in the field of synthetic biology.

Math seminar at HY

In addition to Luma we gave a talk on “Mathematical Modelling in Synthetic Biology” for math students at the University of Helsinki. After giving them a “Biology 101” lecture, they got to hear how modelling was done in our project. It was great to see that so many people were interested in our project as well as modelling in regards of synthetic biology. It might be that some of those students present there will be the members of Aalto-Helsinki 2017, who knows.

Media

Our project was on display in the media. We had quite a few articles written about us and we were even a part of a radio program. As we had also gotten sponsorships from certain companies they posted about us and our project on their web pages which was nice.

The University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Science wrote an article about our project and especially what the two mathematicians of our team had learned from this synthetic biology project. The article was later posted also on the university’s main news page. Articles are unfortunately in Finnish.

Faculty of Science https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/uutiset/suvi-sauna-ja-sinileva

The university’s news page http://www.helsinki.fi/ml/ajankohtaista/2016/igem-kilpailu.html

Also, Aalto University’s School of Chemical Engineering posted an article about our project, iGEM and synthetic biology.

School of Chemical Engineering http://www.aalto.fi/fi/current/news/2016-07-01-002/ (in Finnish)

TEK magazine, the magazine of Tekniikan akateemiset which is a organization for Academics of Technology, published an article about us as well. The article was a part of their students page where they present different kind of career possibilities and such for their student members. The article is in Finnish.

TEK https://lehti.tek.fi/opiskelijat/hiivalla-sinilevamyrkyn-kimppuun

Finland’s public broadcasting company YLE’s radio show about science called Tiedeykkönen featured an episode about synthetic biology and iGEM. The episode mainly focused on Aalto-Helsinki 2015’s journey in iGEM, but also our team and project was mentioned. The broadcast of the episode can be listened here: http://areena.yle.fi/1-3424583 (in Finnish).

We have also been or will be a part of our sponsors’ blogs. Algol has posted a few posts about our journey in iGEM on their blog, and want to also publish something once we return from Boston. Also LAL will post in their member magazine an article about our iGEM experience after Jamboree.

iGEM meetups

We attended two iGEM meetups, the Nordic iGEM Conference in Stockholm and the European Experience in Paris. We consider them also as our human practices since we got a lot of input from them into our project and got to talk about our ideas with other iGEMers. We have written about the meetups on the Community page.

Website

We have created a website in addition to Wiki which includes team descriptions, brief information about our project and partners. It also contains a description of synthetic biology, safety conscious statement and explains what iGEM is. We have been using our website for various purposes, e.g. to spread the word of iGEM, tell people about our project and about ourselves. We have also used it for fundraising purposes by including logos of our sponsors on our website.

This website also contains information about previous years’ Aalto-Helsinki iGEM teams. It gives similar information about them - what they were, what they have worked on.One can access our blog, facebook, twitter and instagram accounts using it too.

http://www.aaltohelsinki.com/2016/index.html

Blog

During this summer we have been posting about our weekly achievements and activities in our blog. We hope that this has helped people to follow our work better and in a way bring them closer to our research and what it is like to be a part of an iGEM team. Each of our team members has also presented themselves, so if one wants to get to know our team a bit better,

http://blog.aaltohelsinki.com/

About future Human Practices

Even though Wiki Freeze and the Giant Jamboree are here, we have still some human practices left after all this. We will be presenting our project results and achievements from the Jamboree to some of our sponsors as well as school representatives. As a part of the recruiting the next year’s team, we will present our project on a few different events: in Water Day of the School of Engineering’s where different project related to water industry are presented and in Career day of Faculty of biological and environmental Sciences.