Education and Communication

Instagram

When conducting research, it is crucial to be able to educate a wider audience of people about the project and its results. To do so, we condensed our project information into short instagram posts help to make our project, our goals, and our some of our experiments accessible comprehensible to a general audience. By using Instagram, we hoped to reach individuals with a non-scientific background that were students or young adults.

Introducing what iGEM is and the 2021 competition

Because Instagram is widely used by individuals, organizations, and news companies, it is a great platform that helps our research be accessible to larger audiences and organizations who may be interested in our solution to plastic and oil pollution. Moreover, using Instagram Posts as a method of communication also allows us to reach our target audience more effectively, and also allows for greater interaction with our content.

Introducing the team project and bacteriophage infection cycles

Through Instagram, we have also been able to interact with other iGEM teams. We follow their work and have been able to see what they are working on. We have even communicated with other iGEM teams through instagram’s direct message features. We aimed to connect with these teams in order to build and be a part of a larger science community of researchers.

Introducing P1 bacteriophage and why we chose it for our project

Our target audience is composed of juniors and seniors in high school as well as current undergraduate students. Using Instagram is a great way to reach out to individuals who are in high school and university as they form a large population of Instagram’s user base. We made posts to cover specific parts of our research project, and translated our research into non-scientific language to help more individuals understand our project. We also spread out our information into multiple posts to not only allow for more thorough explanations, but also to not inundate anyone with too much scientific information, which can be overwhelming. We also included images that can help viewers in processing the information.

Explaining the Human Practices of our project and the issue we're addressing

We mainly targeted undergraduate students who would be interested in our research to help start conversations about environmental cleanup and synthetic biology. Because our research is heavily related to pollution cleanup efforts, we also targeted companies and news organizations that also have Instagram accounts, to whom our research in ocean clean-up efforts is relevant. These high schoolers and undergraduates will be our future research who can take our research and develop it further to save the planet!

Explaining the degradation enzymes we worked with and how they breakdown plastic

To make our information more accessible and interactive, we utilized some of Instagram’s interactive features. We posted information in posts and allowed for individuals to comment on these posts asking questions about our research and specific parts of our project. Because we have split our information into multiple posts, it allows for individuals to ask questions specific to different parts of our project. We also utilized Instagram’s story feature. We posted on our story that if people have questions, they could “swipe up” and respond to our story with questions about our project and then posted our answer on our story.

Q&A through Instagram comments and story responses

Introducing the issue of environmentally harmful chemical surfactants and our plan to solve this issue through engineering the production of biosurfactants in Marine bacteria