Team:NIT Warangal/Communication
iGEM Collective Outreach Program
Our target is primarily to educate students and people aged below 25 about Gossypol. We chose this as our target group because the target group contains an extensive range of daily internet users. Thus, reaching out to the target group is relatively easy. It is also because influencing the younger population would be beneficial in the long run. Therefore, in collaboration with Team Warwick, We published an article about Gossypol on the iGEM Collective Outreach booklet aimed at students aged 16-18 years old. The booklet also contains 20 such articles aimed at developing knowledge about Synthetic Biology. Each article is also coupled with a fun activity to make the reading more interactive. This initiative helped us to create awareness on Gossypol and Synthetic Biology among high school students.
Collective Outreach program booklet from Team Warwick
Journal Initiative
Through the collaboration with iGEM Team Maastricht 2021, we were able to publish a review paper in one of the journals, MSP Vector Journal. We could publish our work "Biological Detoxification of Gossypol in Cottonseed Meal" in the journal. Our work was a review paper based on the research papers published on Gossypol. The journal initiative helped us to communicate our work to the scientific community.
MSP Vector Journal from Team Maastricht
Comic Strips
Our target audiences are students and people aged below 25. For such a target audience, interactive outreach media is an ideal way for effective communication. Thus, we created two comic strips which effectively communicate our idea. These comic strips would also help in creating awareness about Gossypol among our target group.
The first comic strip is based on some of our research results. Thus, it aims at people who have basic knowledge about biology. Whereas, the second comic strip aims at a general audience with little to no knowledge about biology.
We are working on translating the comic strips into regional languages to reach out to an extensive-ranging audience. You can find the comic strips below.
Public opinion on our project
We believe that it is essential for the success of our project that we reach out to the real-world audience to
get their opinions about the work we are doing and the solution we are proposing. Thus, we created a survey to
gather public feedback on our project. Aspects such as future scope, scalability, public excitement, stakeholder
identification were analyzed through this feedback survey.
The key takeaways from the feedback:
- 86% of the respondents had an excitement level of 8 or more on our project on a scale of 1-10.
- 87.5% of the respondents felt that our project is crucial and helpful for society.
- 90% of the respondents opinionated that our project would likely help reduce the problem of malnutrition.
- 37.5% of respondents think that now is the right time to scale up and launch our project, whereas 42.2% of respondents felt that within a couple of years would be the right time to scale up and float our project.
- 79.7% of the respondents felt that our project has scalability and future scope of 4 and above, on a scale of 1-5.
Reaching audience through Radio NITW
We organized a radio talk show in collaboration with our institute radio body Radio NITW. Through this talk show, we aimed at educating students of our institute on our project. We talked about various topics in this talk show, including Cottonseed as a protein source, Gossypol, iGEM, and synthetic biology in general. Our talk will be uploaded soon to the social media handles and on the Radio Club app of Radio NITW, which would make our radio show accessible to the general public. It is a popular and official means in the institute to reach out to a vast audience at the same time. It will help increase awareness about the protein-rich CSM and its possibility for human consumption.
Social Media Outreach
Social media is a powerful medium for public engagement. Due to the pandemic, a significant part of our outreach happened through social media. We posted surveys, posters, trivial facts among others on our social media platforms and engaged with the public virtually. You can find some of our social media posts below:
