Education

We held a workshop in Hokkaido University Festival, as iGEM HokkaidoU team, following last year. In this event, we tried to explain these things

• "What is DNA?" and "DNA is actually familiar to us actualy."
• “What is iGEM?” and “What is our activity?”

To achieve our goal, we conducted an experiment: “Detection of DNA extraction from banana” and poster sessions: “What is DNA?” , ”What is synthetic biology? ” and “What is iGEM?”

In the experiment, participants used only daily materials to get more familiar with DNA.

How to Exmeriment

1. Crush one third of banana with spoon; to break its cell wall
2. Mix well 10% saltine water 30 mL and detergent 2.5 mL; Saltine water makes nucleic acid and salt. Detergent breaks cell membrane.
3. Pour 1 and 2 into a beaker through coffee filter and filtrate them.
4. After 5minutes or so, pour 100% ethanol 40 mL into the beaker slowly.
5. Then you’ll see some white lump, that’s exactly DNA!!

This experiment is so easy that people of all ages, from children to the elderly, are able to enjoy it and feel DNA is familiar with them.

Poster Session

In poster session, we made a presentation about four contents; about DNA, gene recombination, iGEM and our project of last year.

We drew posters with pictures and illustrations to let people understand easily and had some conversation with them to know how they understand our explanation. We had a good chance to communicate with people having various background or generation and to practice presentation.

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Survey

We took questionnaires from participants of our workshop, 133 people.

We got comments about image for gene recombination, following.