Outreach

When we began sharing our project with the world, we did not just want to show what we were doing, but we wanted to explain why it matters. Our goal for outreach was to make synthetic biology accessible, relatable, and inspiring for experts as well as the general public and science enthusiasts. With our team newsletter, where we documented our progress, insights, and challenges, we continued a long tradition, as the newsletter is something iGEM Düsseldorf does every year. We attempted to present it in a way that anyone could follow along, showcasing the human side of science and offering our audience a glimpse behind the lab doors. As our project evolved, so did our outreach. We joined Science slams, where we presented our idea to a wider audience, and participated in the Tag der Forschung, an inspiring day filled with discussions about biology, chemistry, physics, law, languages, psychology and more. Each event gave us the chance to listen as much as we spoke — to understand public perception, answer questions, and see our work from new perspectives. Through conversations at various other events, we realised that outreach is not a one-way process. It is a dialogue — one that continually shapes the way we think about science and its role in society.

Newsletter

In order to make our work more accessible and share our progress and iGEM journey, we published a newsletter every month and continue to do so. This newsletter fulfils an important role in communicating to professors, current and former iGEM participants, family, friends and generally everyone who expresses interest in our project or iGEM. More specifically, the subjects developed quite a lot over our year - it all started with documenting our project finding phase, which continued in the search for a lab and PIs, which then led to lab work, real-time developments and progress of our project STREAM. But as this is not all that iGEM is, we also wrote about human practices, outreach, meetups and much more. Ultimately, the newsletter was a great tool to capture advancement, inform the readers about current developments and other outreach events they could attend and also to reflect upon everything that happened each month. That is why you could say that the newsletter was outreach first, but also a great opportunity for our team to look back on.

Tag der Forschung

On June 5th, 2025, as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf opened its doors for the "Tag der Forschung" (Day of Research), inviting everyone curious about biology, chemistry, physics, law, languages, psychology, and much more.

In addition to numerous hands-on activities and guided tours through various university laboratories, visitors had the chance to gain deeper insights through lectures given by both professors and students. Our team was excited to contribute by not only offering a glimpse into the world of iGEM and synthetic biology but also presenting the fundamentals of bioproduction and our very own project STREAM.

The day concluded with a Science Slam that brought research and entertainment together in the best possible way. All in all it was a great opportunity to make our project accessible for a broad audience.

EY-Biotechnology-Roadshow

A vital part to our iGEM-team was to present our project to interested parties in order to get feedback and resources to improve our project. In June we had the honor to attend the Roadshow for the German EY Biotechnology Report, which was an amazing opportunity to connect with people in the biotech industry and try to secure sponsors and feedback.

The event started with some presentations. We listened to interesting inputs about geopolitics and their effect on the economies, the perspective of a contract research organization (CRO) on global dynamic shifts in chemical production and biotechnology and a lot more. The presentation of the German EY Biotechnology Report was especially insightful. The Report offers insights into the current trends and challenges for the German biotech industry. During the presentations we also got the chance to introduce our project to everyone attending. An interesting panel discussion about a wide range of topics concerning the biotech industry followed the presentations and finally the floor was open for conversation and discussion in small groups. There we talked to a lot of interesting representatives from the biotech-industry, legal firms and startups, we got feedback on our project and connected with a lot of people in the biotech industry.

One of these was Phytowelt Green Technologies, a biotechnology company specializing in sustainable bioproduction of aroma compounds such as raspberry flavor and vanillin. They became relevant in our later human practices work. We had a really good time and are very thankful to BioRiver who gave us this special opportunity.

Figure 1: Our three team members (from the left) Mareen Krügel, Ilana Schürmeyer and Evan Seidler, who attended the event

Science slam

The Science Slam Düsseldorf is an annual public science competition at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where young scientists present their own research or explain scientific insights from books or other publications to a lay audience in an engaging and entertaining way. Unlike a poetry slam, no texts are read aloud and no poems are recited. Presenters have a maximum of ten minutes and may use all tools of a scientific lecture, such as slides, props, and live demonstrations, as well as interaction with the audience or moderator. The winner is determined by audience vote. In May 2025, our member Anna-Sophie Körner and former member Dariush Yaghmaie Zadeh participated in a presentation titled "How Not to Do a SynthBio Project". The talk humorously reflected on the team’s recent journey, highlighting the challenges and unexpected turns of our work. Topics ranged from project ideas that were abandoned from the planning phase to the ways our research sometimes resembled the workings of a tech start-up. The presentation mixed scientific content with personal anecdotes, exaggeration, and self-irony, in keeping with the lighthearted nature of the Science Slam format. The competition featured a variety of memorable talks. The winning presentation recounted the speaker’s experience researching blue OLED crystals in Glasgow while wearing a kilt. Other contributions covered artificial intelligence research and the comical difficulties of explaining the taxation of antimatter to customs authorities. We like to describe our participation as both rewarding and entertaining, noting that the event offered a valuable opportunity to share science with the public in a relaxed and creative environment.

Figure 2: Our team members Dariush Yaghmaie Zadeh and Anna-Sophie Körner presenting at the Science Slam © Christian Bair

Paper for the MSP - Vector Journal 2025

In August, the MSP Vector iGEM team from Maastricht University approached our team. Vector is a journal focused on the unofficial proceedings of the iGEM year with peer-reviewed papers written by and for iGEM teams.

The participants can choose between a literature review on a topic of their choice or a research paper of their iGEM project. After submission, the papers undergo a double-blind Peer review. The best ones will be published, and on top of this, the three best articles will be forwarded to researchers and journal editors working in the field of synthetic biology for review and feedback.

We took the opportunity and agreed to write the paper, as this was an excellent opportunity to gain insight into the process of publishing and peer reviewing. We decided to go with a literature review, with the title: „The history of biosynthesis of vanillin from ferulic acid and its key events“. This topic is adjacent to our project because it discusses vanillin, one of our exemplary molecules. After days of very hard work, we submitted the paper. We also peer-reviewed three papers of other teams from all over the world as part of this subproject. All in all, this experience helped us reflect on our project and present a part of it to other iGEM teams, which was an amazing opportunity.

Future Tech Fest

Outreach and networking are also a part of our project; for this, we sometimes visit regional events and present our project. This time, we also had such an opportunity at the Future-Tech-Fest in Düsseldorf, where some of our advisors and our PI attended. The Future-Tech-Fest is the largest B2B startup fair in Germany, and this year, more than 300 startups, 90 speakers and 5000 people attended - and in the middle of this excitement, we presented our project, STREAM.

For our booth, we set up our chemostat with food colouring in order to simulate our whole system. This was a great field test because we were able to work out a few hurdles, such as the right position of our motor. The day had a lot in store for us: On one hand, our project got pitched to a lot of interested people and valuable contacts were secured that might be relevant for our human practices work. Many people stopped by to chat about our system. On the other hand, we also got to know some very interesting startups and companies. Especially interesting were the small and low-cost sensors for petri dishes, solar panels that aligned with the sun and robot hands with remote control. Additionally, we heard some inspiring talks by some founders and entrepreneurs. All in allwe got to see many ingenious ideas and were able to secure a lot of helpful contacts - a full success, wouldn’t you say?

Figure 3: Our poster at the future tech fest

Conclusion

Our outreach journey taught us that engagement is valuable not only in the lab, but also outside of it. Every time we spoke to someone outside of our field, whether at a science fair or at a public event, we were reminded that curiosity truly drives discovery. Through interactions like that, we were able to refine how we present our project, making it clearer, more engaging, or more grounded in everyday relevance. They also reinforced our belief that synthetic biology can and should be a field open to everyone — not just researchers, but also the communities that benefit from innovation. Looking back, the most beautiful part of outreach wasn’t the number of events we attended or posts we shared, but the connections we built with people who shared our passion.