CONTENTS

Overview AroMatch Quiz Custom Name Program

Overview

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University course presentations

In order to spread the iGEM values and advertise them, we organized several presentations both at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki in various courses with suitable topics.

In these presentations, our team not only presented the project overview but also explained the iGEM concept and its values. We shared with the students the mechanism of the whole process and what is required to participate. To enhance their interest, we included examples relating their studies to different iGEM projects and we included our social events and trips.

Sharing these presentations among the students of these Finnish universities is a tool we are using to spread awareness about the iGEM competition in order to recruit the following team.

AroMatch Quiz

Social media is a useful tool to spread knowledge in an enjoyable manner and it is available to everyone. We have been sharing our project journey throughout Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, and our Blogpost.

To make use of these tools, our team decided to create a series of educational comics. They are about the awesome world of synthetic biology and Dr. Bio and their purpose is to educate kids as well as the curious public. In these comics, we delve into synthetic biology as well as more basic concepts such as explaining what a cell is, DNA, and proteins among others. We also included an infographic about GMOs to share their advantages and safety in regard to food production. In that way, when introducing our project, it is helpful for the public to already have a background. Our graphic design team created the characters, graphics, and the story explained.

We have been receiving very positive feedback from the public and it has been a very easy and funny way to familiarize the general public with biology.

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Custom Name Program

We greatly appreciate the assistance and guidance we've received throughout this project from various experts. In order to keep them all updated on our progress, we sent out a biweekly newsletter. The newsletter contained information on our successes and challenges during the summer, including more detailed information about our drylab-overview. By doing this, we were able to keep everyone informed and show our appreciation for the help we've received.

Most experts are quite specialized in their own fields and may not necessaríly be accustomed to other fields. In order to combat that, our newsletter served to share more intersectional information we had gathered. We hope that everyone who has read our newsletter learned something new or interesting. Above all else, we hope that everyone is more interested in synthetic biology. You can find some excerpts from our newsletters below.

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  1. Li, Z., Wang, X., & Zhang, H. (2019). Balancing the non-linear rosmarinic acid biosynthetic pathway by modular co-culture engineering. Metabolic engineering, 54, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymben.2019.03.002
  2. Johnston, T. G., Yuan, S. F., Wagner, J. M., Yi, X., Saha, A., Smith, P., Nelson, A., & Alper, H. S. (2020). Compartmentalized microbes and co-cultures in hydrogels for on-demand bioproduction and preservation. Nature communications, 11(1),563. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14371-4
  3. Sundaram, S., Tripathi, A., & Gupta, D. K. (2010). Metabolic modeling of Rosmarinic acid biosynthetic pathway. Bioinformation, 5(4), 168–172. https://doi.org/10.6026/97320630005168.
  4. Raspail, C., Graindorge, M., Moreau, Y., Crouzy, S., Lefèbvre, B., Robin, A. Y., Dumas, R., & Matringe, M. (2011). 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase catalysis: identification of catalytic residues and production of a hydroxylated intermediate shared with a structurally unrelated enzyme. The Journal of biological chemistry, 286(29),26061–26070. https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.M111.227595
  5. Levsh, O., Pluskal, T., Carballo, V., Mitchell, A. J., & Weng, J. K. (2019). Independent evolution of rosmarinic acid biosynthesis in two sister families under the Lamiids clade of flowering plants.The Journal of biological chemistry, 294(42), 15193–15205. https://doi.org/10.1074/jbc.RA119.010454
  6. Tegel, H., Ottosson, J., & Hober, S. (2011). Enhancing the protein production levels in Escherichia coli with a strong promoter.The FEBS journal, 278(5), 729–739. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1742-4658.2010.07991.x
  7. Ahn, J., Park, K. M., Lee, H., Son, Y. J., & Choi, E. S. (2013). GAL promoter-driven heterologous gene expression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae Δ strain at anaerobic alcoholic fermentation. FEMS yeast research, 13(1),140–142. https://doi.org/10.1111/1567-1364.12009
  8. Elison, G. L., Xue, Y., Song, R., & Acar, M. (2018). Insights into Bidirectional Gene Expression Control Using the Canonical GAL1/GAL10 Promoter. Cell reports, 25(3), 737–748.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2018.09.050
  9. Giacalone, M. J., Gentile, A. M., Lovitt, B. T., Berkley, N. L., Gunderson, C. W., & Surber, M. W. (2006). Toxic protein expression in Escherichia coli using a rhamnose-based tightly regulated and tunable promoter system. BioTechniques, 40(3),355–364. https://doi.org/10.2144/000112112