As our software aims to improve the field of synthetic biology by increasing the availability of new parts, Spore_Core aims to expand the community by increasing interest in synbio. This goal was made possible by Saddleback College, Nevada Union High School, and the collaborative efforts of a handful of other like-minded iGEM teams.

The Saddleback Presentation

On September 30th, we presented our research, and the research of other teams (Moscow-Russia, UC Santa Cruz, Stanford, and UC San Diego’s 2018 project) to a general biology class at a community college in Mission Viejo, CA.
When asked how many people had heard of synthetic biology before, the class responded with zero. The same result was returned by asking how many had heard of bioinformatics (The responses were measured in zoom hand-raises).
So, we presented our research to them as an introduction to the two fields: bioinformatics, and synthetic biology. We did our best to engage the students, difficult as that is over a screen-share, by also providing interesting examples of other teams and their accomplishments.

The Nevada Union High School Presentations

Through the second week of October, we presented to six classes at Nevada Union High School. The classes were as follows: Earth and Space Science (two classes), Physics (two classes), AP Physics, and AP Chemistry. We presented the same Saddleback presentation, but slightly simplified. We provided our wiki link and emails to each class so that the students could directly ask us any questions they had about iGEM and/or research in these fields.
The physics teacher who allowed us to teach his classes (thank you, Mr. Mayer) reported that students had reached out to him about the possibility of an iGEM team at Nevada Union. We were very pleased to hear about this.

Spore_Core is very thankful to the other teams who helped with this presentation. UC Santa Cruz set up a virtual meeting, inviting us and Stanford. Here, they presented their project to us and allowed us to share it with Saddleback College as an example.
Stanford also presented to us, allowed us to share their project, and also provided us with access to their promo video, which introduced the students to synthetic biology’s role in disease diagnostics.
Moscow-Russia created a short video for us, explaining PCR. We used this to show an example of a novel genetics technique that the students had heard of, to demonstrate the feasibility of synthetic biology.
Lastly, to demonstrate how some iGEM teams became start-ups, we shared the story of UC San Diego’s 2018 team, Epinoma, who built a cancer diagnostic tool to improve liquid biopsy testing. The interview we conducted with Epinoma’s team-lead can be found here.

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When presenting our research to the community college, we tried to imagine what we wondered about synthetic biology and bioinformatics when we first heard about them. For me, bioinformatics was inseparable from words like math, computation, and algorithms. As a biology major, these words were deterrents for me. So, we approached the subject cautiously. We gave a quick, simple demonstration of our software, while reminding the students that none of us consider ourselves highly experienced coders. When we showed our promo video, we made a calculated effort to explain our terminology, keeping everything as simple as possible to encourage them.
We also thought about what questions they might have regarding synthetic biology. The main one: ‘How could one get started?’
We began, of course, by explaining what synthetic biology is. Then, we introduced the importance of reading literature to find an interest, followed by the engineering design cycle (Research → Imagine → Design → Build → Test → Learn → Improve → and continue Research), which we built our own experimental design on.

We see the iGEM and synbio community as a wealth of knowledge and opportunity. Expanding the members of this community is valuable, not just to the scientists within it, but to the world, which will get to experience the fruits of it’s effort.
The way we all discovered this community is through collaboration and communication, and projects that continue this trend of outreach are helping to expand it toward a more productive, creative, and knowledgeable future.