Human Practice/ SynBio Day

On the "SynBio Day" we brought the Synthetic Biology into the Hanover city center - at least the theory behind it. We picked August 8th for this "SynBio Day".
We had the opportunity to educate passers-by by showing them interesting things about plant biotechnology, discussing methods of everyday laboratory work and showing how much we care about the biological safety. Of course all of our transformed plants and bacteria remained in the laboratory or greenhouse at all times. We were able to inspire the people for in-vitro cultures of orchids, bananas, apples and meat-eating plants. Two big posters illustrated the plasmids, proteins and model organisms which we use for the iGEM project. The young visitors have been provided with puzzles and selfmade plant-mandalas in the meanwhile.

Beside posters and examples from the greenhouse, we proudly presented a live-experiment for DNA-Isolation out of hand. However, our visitors favorized the direct confrontation. Herein we not only spoke about our project, but also completed some general questionaires about Biotechnology.

The idea to equip plants with the special ability to remove heavy metals from the environment was well received in Hanover, even by peope who are very sceptic about biotechnology in general.