Meet The Farmers

On October 10-12, 2014, Sumbawagen team took ECONEY project to meet the farmers at Batu Dulang and Gapit, the two honey production center in Sumbawa. We carried missions as follow: first, we’d like to introduce our ECONEY project to the honey farmers since they are one of the target of our project implication. Secondly, by taking our project to meet the society we’d like to promote synthetic biology in the society.

This event was opened by welcoming speech from the chief of each village. The event was divided into three sessions.

A. Session one : from honey to ECONEY
The farmer we met used to work with honey, so now we let them to work with ECONEY. Before doing so, we introduce the equipment Sumbawagen used in wetlab activity. Participants also asked to practice using micropippet and shaker in front of other audience guided by Sumbawagen team member. The next thing we do is showing cultivition process and asked them to join to the process.
B. Session two : get in touch with the software
ECONEY is a device used to measure glucose concentration in various sample. In this project, we use various samples of honey from Sumbawa and other part around the world. Through color emitted from our E.coli devices we then able to measure the glucose level with help of our ECONEY software, an android based application. At the end of the, we able to show that glucose concentration in several honeys are different by color.
C. Session three : synthetic biology in the society
Synthetic biology isn’t familiar in Sumbawa society. Synbio classified as the new science. We try to introduce to our participant about synthetic biology and of course iGEM. To introduce iGEM and synthetic biology we used poster. We have 4 poster with different topics, they are synbio in energy, synbio in food, synbio in healty, and biotechnology in general.