Introduction
This year we focussed on developing informative materials, on synthetic biology and spinal cord injuries, targeted particularly at the STEM community and the general public. We were motivated to encourage an open-dialogue, as we recognise that in order to understand the complexity of our project, our target audience would need to be well informed on the synthetic biology foundation.
As part of our science communication, we have developed social media campaigns, written article features and presented our project to a wider audience; with the ultimate aim of encouraging participation of all key stakeholders in our growing community. Our communication research was completed in parallel to our education outreach, which is available on our Education Page.
The Importance of Trust
After attending the iGEM Opening Weekend Festival, our team was introduced to Hilary Sutcliffe, Director of Society Inside, who delivered a talk on the importance of developing trust with our wider audience. Following this segment, we were motivated to learn more about Hilary’s work and understand its applications in developing our project.
In order to do this, we arranged a meeting to better understand effective science communication, particularly focussing on our project's intent, from the impact of the patient to the design of our technology. She suggested we incorporate short and long sentences throughout our pitches, creating different layers of communication. Additionally, she suggested we refer to her 7 signals of trustworthiness, where we should consider some of the following points:
- The intent of our project: how we plan to solve the problem
- The competency of our project: will our solution solve the problem
- Transparency: we need to be open about potential problems we may face
- Fairness: will our solution be available and accessible to our target market
- Integrity: are we being realistic about our ability to solve the problem
These values have been considered and are integrated throughout our engineering cycles, which can be found here.
Overall, our conversation with Hilary allowed us to recognise the importance of integrating different stakeholders opinions into our design process, clearly defining our objectives by removing any specialist language and ensuring our solution is fit for its purpose.
We were determined to have a strong media presence on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. We understood that through our article publications, we were able to target a scientific audience. However, in order to access the more general public, we needed to publish our work on more accessible platforms like social media.
For this reason, following Hilary Sutcliffe’s advice, we set out to develop informative and scientifically accurate content, which was simple and approachable to promote synthetic biology awareness among laymen.
After reviewing Instagram's algorithm we established that short posts of 3-4 photos attract the most attention. In order to make our page more professional and accessible, our design team established a colour scheme and a 4-repeat feed pattern, which was maintained throughout the season. We also used short and informative video clips to help boost our outreach and audience interaction. Below we have highlighted the main social media campaigns we organised to promote open dialogue with our audience.
Introducing Renervate Therapeutics
Throughout the whole competition we focussed on informing our audience about our project ideas, goals and achievements. We established that around 60% of our audience are within the 18-24 age range, which led us to tailoring our content to include advice on work-life balance at university, tips for remote exams, useful apps etc.
We also reached out to the iGEM community by sharing tips from our experience on how to conduct iGEM online, how to prioritise emotional and mental health throughout the season and much more. Some of our most popular posts included our team member introductions, which we recognised as our audience wanting to see a more personal perspective of who was working on the project.
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Spinal Cord Injury Awareness
During the month of September we decided to raise awareness about Spinal Cord Injuries by uploading educational posts on our Instagram and Facebook pages every day. We decided to cover a range of topics from general awareness of the condition, to social aspects like employability and accessibility. We covered how synthetic biology can be involved in treatment and care. Every week we made sure to promote a charity by explaining their goals and values and most importantly how our audience could get involved in their work. We covered organisations like Spinal Injuries Association, Paralysis Recovery Foundation, Back Up Trust, Spinal Research Charity and Aspire. During this month we reached over 2,000 accounts while increasing our content interactions by 42%. Our most popular SynBio post covered the application of CRISPR-dead Cas-9 technology in chronic pain treatment and our most popular social post involved representation of SCI in films. Overall the campaign was successful since we managed to reach a wide audience and spark conversation in the commentaries section.
Synthetic Biology Applications
One of our most consistent series was Applications of Synthetic Biology. We created short 30-40 seconds videos that covered a range of applications from the environment to biotechnology, to food and drink etc. We wanted to show our audience how they encounter synbio in everyday life without even realising it while explaining the mechanisms in a simple manner.
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Collaborations
Social media was one of the main channels for communication with the iGEM community. We consistently kept participating in collaboration challenges and posted updates about our shared work and meetings. We participated in iGEM Friendzymes “Rise a pipette” initiative to acknowledge that failure is a big part of scientific research and that it is acceptable to make mistakes as long as you learn from them in the process. We also participated in iGEM GO Paris-Saclay’s #iGEMMonumentChallenge which was a great way to meet new 2021 teams and follow them around the world by exploring their countries, cities or universities. Several other collaborations included the “Travelling lab coat” by iGEM Sorbonne and the “Postcard exchange” by iGEM Duesseldorf.
Coronavirus guidelines update
COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on our team’s work. Since we had several internal rules and guidelines to keep our team safe we wanted to contribute to the community and keep them updated about the recent government guidelines. When we started our work in March the UK was in national lockdown and as our project progressed the rules kept constantly changing. Sometimes even we found long pages of governmental advice and updates confusing so we created simplified infographics with major updates for significant dates in the “roadmap out of lockdown”. We wanted to ensure that our audience is safe and give them access to reliable information. In line with that, we incorporated the use of synthetic biology in vaccine development. Our “Facts about the COVID-19 vaccines” which dispelled common myths and rumours about the vaccines reached over 600 people .
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Quiz Saturday
To encourage interaction and establish how our content is perceived, we created Quiz Saturdays. For a few months on Saturdays, we posted a quiz on Instagram stories with questions about the content that we posted throughout the week and encouraged people to revisit posts if they could not answer some of the questions. This series boosted our engagement and allowed us to understand which types of posts are most comprehensible and memorable.
Article Features
Neurosphere by KCL Neuroscience Society
Science communication is key for reaching individuals unfamiliar with the scientific community and is achieved by delivering clear, factual and accurate information in an easy to understand and accessible manner. As aforementioned, the use of non-scientific language, without making any assumptions of the reader’s prior knowledge, provides individuals with the opportunity to engage with scientific fields with greater confidence and understanding. We utilised this approach with our first article “Understanding Spinal Cord Injuries (SCI)”, this article provided us with the opportunity to share important statistics surrounding SCI diagnosis as well as discuss the long term mental and physical impact of SCI with respect to management and rehabilitation protocols. Collectively, we were able to reach over 850 people on various platforms including Facebook and Instagram and establish an audience to raise awareness on key daily issues faced by SCI patients worldwide.
In the second article we wrote for Neurosphere, we brought attention and spread awareness about iGEM as a platform for synthetic biology. We showcased to students of the life sciences how iGEM gives the opportunity for students to develop solutions to worldwide problems and showcase their achievements. By providing information on how to join iGEM as well as internal societies, we encouraged the readers to engage in synthetic biology and biotechnology to solve world problems. This article also allowed us to illustrate how our project has developed from last year.
Science Mind
The aim of our article for Science Mind was to initially develop the readers' understanding of the consequences of SCI, followed by education of possible therapies that may provide solutions, with a particular emphasis on the power of scientific research. One such innovative treatment, as is being applied within our current project, is the application of chondroitinase ABC (ChABC). Here, we provided the reader with clear facts related to the benefits of this enzyme, particularly in terms of improvements to motor function. Presenting the reader with possible solutions provides a source of hope and is a valuable tool in gaining public interest, helping to remind individuals that we have the power to help others through sharing information and developing our own understanding of those in need. In this regard, raising awareness of the importance of scientific research is also critical. Here we outlined such information in short article form, providing the general public with digestible content that they may not usually be exposed to. It is extremely important that we attempt to bridge the interdisciplinary gap, as collaboration often yields novel perspectives and solutions, providing invaluable insight into future approaches.
The Catalyst
We collaborated with The Catalyst, a novel, chemistry student-led magazine based in London. Their first edition highlighted a variety of topics in Therapeutic Chemistry, including the Thalidomide tragedy to an upcoming Alzheimer’s Disease treatment. We greatly valued the opportunity to collaborate with The Catalyst as we were able to expand the scope of our outreach to undergraduate chemistry students and leading experts in the subject.
Chemistry underpins the properties of all organic and inorganic molecules within a bio-environment, hence it lies at the core behaviour of our mussel adhesive protein. While chemical functionalities and binding modes are thoroughly covered by chemistry students at undergraduate level, interdisciplinary links are often overlooked.
Therefore we decided to bridge the gap in their academic curricula by writing an article depicting the chemical characteristics of our PVFP-5 polypeptide as well as shedding light on how E. Coli recombinant technology is used to synthesise engineered proteins.
Informing chemistry university students how their degree could blend with synthetic biology allowed us to unlock an open dialogue with ‘The Catalyst’ audience, while educating us on how to maintain a language and a content accessible to them.
Outreach at King's College London
In Phase I of our project, we founded the KCL Biotechnology and Synthetic Biology Society and this year our Team Leader, Alya Masoud Abdelhafid, took over the Presidency.
We were motivated to continue developing a Synthetic Biology community at King’s College London, with a greater focus on incorporating individuals from different academic disciplines. We attended the Welcome Fair at our institution, where we received over 75 sign-ups to our mailing list and over 65 official members to our society.
We look forward to planning events with key-speakers in Synthetic Biology, like Dr George Church, networking sessions and ultimately encouraging academic growth in Synthetic Biology for the student body at KCL.
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Podcasts
We were happy to be invited to speak on the Manchester iGEM podcast to discuss synthetic biology, our projects, and teams. This podcast was an engaging and informative method of communicating our teams ideas and visions of our projects, and the future of synthetic biology.
KCL iGEM x Manchester Podcast
Interviews
Genscript
The KCL iGEM team were fortunate to have the opportunity to be interviewed by GenScript Biotech, this short interview proved to be an ideal platform for us to promote our therapeutics project and bring awareness to the field of SCI and the current treatments available. This enabled us to inform our audience of the details of our project surrounding the methodology, human practices and overarching goals that underpin the development of our project. We were able to discuss the importance of participation by researchers, professional healthcare workers and members of the public interested in synthetic biology in producing a holistic, targeted treatment for spinal cord injury.
London SynBio Network
We were delighted to be invited to present at the first workshop of the 2021/22 academic year by the London Synbio Network. This network was established across London universities to encourage discussion, collaboration, and a community between laboratories, especially amongst early career researchers.
Each year they dedicate one of the workshops to the iGEM teams to give them a chance to present their projects to the public for the first time and get some valuable feedback before presenting at the Giant Jamboree. We are grateful for the opportunity to share our project and ideas with such a vast network of people interested in synthetic biology.
After our presentation we were provided with feedback by Yan-Kay, mentor of the Friendzymes team, who advised us to further elaborate on available treatments for SCI and compare how Renervate Therapeutics fits in the picture.
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