The St. Mark's School of Texas iGEM Team has been actively promoting the field of biotechnology in our community. This year, the team released many tutorial videos for the basic protocols to help newer teams learn the basics of biotechnology. From 3A assembly to running a gel, we hope that with these videos we can help newer teams and people interested in biotechnology get their foot in the door and provide them the fundamental training to get started to make their own explorations and discoveries. We have also been very active on the social media and have created a comic to promote our cause to the world.

Brendan Court

The team has also been working with many agencies to help promote the spread of biotechnology especially for the youth. One of the agencies that we worked with is Brendan Court. Brendan Court is a four-week, tuition-free enrichment program for middle school boys that is hosted annually at St. Mark's School of Texas. These students are exposed to many opportunities that may not be available at their own schools, such as photography, computer and word processing, physical education, poetry workshops, model rocket building, and more. The St. Mark's iGEM team wanted to add bio-engineering to this list, and we worked exclusively with the students for one day. We gave them a tour of the lab and introduced them to the work that we did. We gave a presentation about lung cancer and how a bio-sensor would be able to detect the disease in early stages and save lives. We also allowed the students to participate in biology labs and gain some hand-on experience. They observed slides of different cells through microscopes and breathed into bromothymol blue solutions through a straw. Most of the solutions change color as the students exhaled, but some of the solutions contained a buffer and as a result did not experience any pH or color change. Finally, we showed them some simple science demonstrations with dry ice and elephant paste.