<p> In total, 50 high school students from two high schools in Uppsala visited Uppsala University for a week. We started the week with a presentation about our project and our results, since this took place in the very last week of iGEM. We also held a lecture about methods in synthetic biology, starting from the central dogma of biology and moving towards more complicated subjects. Margareta Krabbe and Anthony Forster held lectures about synthetic biology and their work as well, which was greatly appreciated both by us and by the students.
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After a session thoroughly discussing what we were going to do and safety measures, the students were taken to the lab. We had one school work in the morning, and the other one in the afternoon. We started with a safety tour of the lab so that the students would be prepared in case of an emergency. However, we also took the opportunity to show our 37° room and some of our equipment, which seemed to spark an interest in some of the students.
After the tour, we got to work. The students were asked to choose 3 “mystery plasmids” from a selection and got instructions on how to transform competent bacteria. The plasmids contained genes for different chromoproteins and fluorescent proteins that we constructed using sequences given to us by Letian Bao, PhD student at the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology at Uppsala University. We also made the competent cells and wrote an easy-to-understand protocol in both Swedish and English so that both students and lab leaders could understand. The lab leaders consisted of members of the Uppsala iGEM team who helped the students, oversaw safety and showed techniques such as spreading techniques. The students worked with chloramphenicol resistant bacteria, except for one strain that was kanamycin resistant but was still plated on a chloramphenicol plate. One important topic we discussed was using genes for antibiotic resistance in order to select for bacteria that had taken up plasmids. In order to show proof of concept, two groups plated the kanamycin resistant bacteria on kanamycin-plates to show the groups what would happen if the same strain was plated on plates using different antibiotics, and how that could be used in real life.
