Team:IISc-Bangalore/EC Communication
Synthetic Biology Symposium
We organized a Synthetic Biology Symposium, named "SYNBYTE" on the 21st and 22nd of August 2021. Among the speakers invited to speak at the symposium were synthetic biologists from all over the globe:
- Prof. Marileen Dogterom, TU Delft
- Prof. Abhishek Chatterjee, Dept. Of Chemistry, Boston College.
- Dr. Swaminath Srinivas, Program Director for Gingko Bioworks
- Prof. Steven Benner, Distinguished Fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FAME).
- Prof. Pawan K Dhar, School of biotechnology, JNU
- Prof. Beatrix Sues, Dept. Of Biology, TU Darmstadt
Our objective behind organising this symposium was to bring the synthetic biology scientific community to the general public and our fellow iGEMers. Through the means of the symposium, we wanted the general public engage with synthetic biology and appreciate the versatility of synthetic biology applications.
We took care to represent the voices and opinions of a diverse set of extremely talented and skilled individuals in Synthetic Biology, from all over the world and from both academia and industry, to understand and give other people the opportunity to hear about multiple perspective of synthetic biology.
Professor Nagasuma Chandra in the inauguration talked about the importance of synthetic biology and its role in addressing social challenges. In-silico biology hand in hand with synthetic biology can trigger the next biological revolution. She emphasised on the role played iGEM in this revolution and how iGEM enables the synthetic biology community to come together and deliver innovative solutions tackling societal problems. She echoed our sentiments regarding the organisation of the symposium wherein we hoped to communicate the foundations in the field of synthetic biology in a holistic manner.
Not only did the various individuals share the story of their science with the audience but engaged with members of academia in the audience regarding future research directions and engaged with the general public regarding the practical translation of their science during the moderated question and answer sessions.
To conclude, the team summarised our takeaways from the symposium and expressed our eagerness to see where the field of synthetic biology takes the world in the next few years.
Project promotion video in multiple languages
As part of the required iGEM deliverables, we created a short video to promote our project. Our motivation to record the project promotion videos in different languages arose from a phone call one of our team members made to their family back home. We realised the importance in communicating our science in the native languages of the beneficiary of our projects. About half of India's population relies on agriculture and many million people use pesticides. In order to truly communicate how our team plans to tackle the menace caused by organophosphate pesticide usage, we realised the necessity for us to produce linguistic diverse content. Besides English, the video was recorded in 6 different Indian languages - Hindi, Odia, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, along with the subtitles for all these videos. This was to help our project reach the different corners of our country, India, known for its huge linguistic diversity. According to the 2011 Census of India, 43.63% of our country's population are native speakers of Hindi. The language with the next greatest number of native speakers was Bengali, 8.03% of our country. We were attempting to record our project promotion video in the 10 languages with the highest proportion of native speakers. We especially wanted to record the video in Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Odiya in order to reach as many people as possible. Other language native speakers also are fluent in Hindi or Bengali or English. Kannada holds an especially important place owing to our institution being present in the state of Karnataka where the local language is Kannada. The other languages with high proportion of native speakers were Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati and Urdu. We were unfortunately not able to find translators located on campus to help us record the video in these regional languages within the deadline due to remote classes and work being preferred and suggested as much as possible, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have been working on getting our science translated into these languages. Additionally we are also trying to record the project promotion video in Assamese and Kokborok, the main native languages of the Assamese and Tripuri people respectively. We conservatively estimate based on the 7 languages we have recorded our promotion video in, we are able to reach about 80% of the Indian Population.
Here you can find the links for our projection promotion video in various languages:
Here you can find the links for the translated script for our project promotion video in some other languages:
An Interview with IISc Connect
IISc Connect, the quarterly magazine of the Indian Institute of Science, interviewed our iGEM team. This interview was conducted by Sangeetha Devi Kumar. The magazine is an initiative of the Office of Communications of IISc where they hope to share stories of members, their science and the rich heritage of the IISc community with the outside world.
This was a tremendously important opportunity to communicate and receive inputs from various members of the academic community in IISc about our project.
The points discussed in our interview are listed below:
- A brief introduction to our team and our project idea
- Our multilingual project promotion video initiative
- The vast multitudes of applications of our project
- iGEM Competition and the various stages involved particularly in the post-pandemic world
- Overcoming Adversity in the Face of a Global Pandemic
The first wave of the pandemic was experienced by members of our team off-campus. We didn't have access to labs to start our work. We sought special permission to return back to campus in order to start working in the lab in March 2021. However, the institute shut down all departments within a month due to the second wave of the pandemic and high number of cases. We lost access to labs. We had to live on campus through the second wave away from our families during this very turbulent time.
Our project timeline was greatly delayed. We weren't even able to order reagents or primers we needed to start off with experiments.
Honestly as researchers, we hardly had any wet lab experience and faced a very steep learning curve in the laboratory.
An Interview with GenScript
We were interviewed by Rosemary from GenScript as a part of their sponsorship contest. Apart from it being a part of their contest, it was a wonderful opportunity for us to present our goals and the steps we have planned to take or the steps we took to reach our goals in about 15 minutes.
The points discussed in our interview are listed below:
- Our team consists of primarily third year undergraduates at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru across different disciplines. Our institute has been taking part in iGEM for about 5-6 years.
- The problem our team aimed to address:- Rampant use of organophosphate pesticides and fertilisers leads to runoff water based contamination of water source. This causes several determinantal effects on human health and environment and can't be degraded by the living organisms
- Current chemical techniques to deal with organophosphates aren't effective in large scale settings or themselves give rise to more toxic products.
- Our team's proposed solution is bioremediation.
- Human practices and public education initiatives
- Future Directions
An Interview with Next Gen Scientist's Foundation
Our iGEM team was interviewed by Next Gen Scientist Foundation. The foundation runs several initiatives to promote Indian science and Indian STEM students. The salient points discussed in the interview are:
- Synthetic biology perception by the general public and our thoughts on the role of synthetic biology
- Our team 's approach to brainstorming and ideation for our iGEM project
- Sponsoring and funding our research
- Impact of our iGEM experience on our scientific thought and mettle
- Human practices initiative implemented in light of the pandemic
- Stakeholders and practical implications of our project
- Challenges that are being worked on right now to successful translation of our project in the future
- Changes in the iGEM experience due to the online mode of affairs owing to the pandemic
- Popularising iGEM in other Indian institutes and Benefits of taking part in iGEM
- Our vision of the synthetic biology world, a decade later
An Organophosphate pollution awareness survey
We are conducting a survey to gain information on the use of organophosphate pesticide usage by agriculturalists and gauge the awareness on harmful effect of organophosphates. The survey was designed keeping in mind the 3Rs of human practices, namely reflection, responsibility, and responsiveness.
We wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on our choice to tackle the problem of organophosphate pollutions. We thought it was essentially to actually interact with agriculturalists whose day-to-day life is impacted by the problem we chose to tackle.
We need to be responsible scientists. In order to obtain a truly unprejudiced data, the survey questions need to be framed as unbiasedly and not in a suggestive manner. We took care to avoid usage of suggestive phrases and ensured neutral responses were available to choose from. Additionally we are aiming to get responses from farmers from all over the country. We are in the process of translating this survey into different Indian languages to increase our reach. It also important for us to interpret the responses free of any biases we began the project with.
We plan to re-evaluate our implementation phase based on the results of the survey.
We took care to ensure that no-more than necessary information was asked from the participants.
Here is the link to the questionnaire for our survey, which is meant to be filled by the surveyor. Along with maintaining hard copies of our survey sheet, we enter the responses in this electronic form to ensure ease of information retrieval.
Essay Writing Competition
In order to increase public engagement with synthetic biology, we decided to host a synthetic biology essay writing competition. The topics given for the essay writing competition were:
- A SynBio route towards a more sustainable future
- Bioremediation: future prospects and challenges
The entries had a word limit of 1000 words and could be either typed or handwritten. The participation was incentivised by a promise to feature the winning submission on our team wiki page. The essay penned by Amritesh Sarkar was selected as the best. It can be downloaded here:
The reason we chose these two topics in particular was to increase engagement with our project within our institute 's community. We have presented our topic to the various members of the institute 's community and we wanted to engage with our community in a different manner. It was an interesting platform to hear voices from different members of our community on their views about the role of synthetic biology in a more sustainable future and bioremediation