Team:Manchester/Human Practices/Outreach
Outreach
H
U
M
A
N
P
R
A
C
T
I
C
E
S
FREDsense
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.
IBCarb
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.
Npronet
A few members of our team went to see the networking manager of NPronet, Ms Sarah Shephard. She was very forth coming of our project but advised us on getting our lab work done sooner due to the proof of concept element to our project. She also highlighted the issue of the Alcopatch becoming a game amongst young adults.
Manchester Entreprise
Npronet
