In 2014, the UT Austin iGEM team reached out to the community by going to dozens of Austin coffee shops, located throughout the city (figure 1), and collected samples of their house coffee. We then took these samples back to our lab, and using a strain of E. coli previously developed by the 2012 UT Austin iGEM, we employed the E. coli to assess how much caffeine was present in each cup of coffee (figure 2).
A couple of weeks later, we presented this data at the 2014 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival as part of the SXSW Create section, which focuses on maker/hacker/do-it-yourself science and technology. As part of this outreach, we explained our project and synthetic biology to a wide range of people (figure 3 - poster).
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