The Brambleton Lyme 5K

One of our most important fundraising events which occured this year was the Loudoun Lyme 5K Run. The run was an excellent area for us to showcase our research, as it was based very close to our location and many people participated. Through this run, we learned about other comapnies' work on lyme disease, presented our work, and interacted with many people who came to support Loudoun Lyme and Capital Lyme. We additionally were able to make more and more people in our community aware about synthetic biology

Loudoun County STEM at NOVA

Purifying DNA and designing your own organism @LoCoSTEMday pic.twitter.com/BMFMA5Tdlb

— Rock Ridge iGem (@Rock_Ridge_IGEM) October 1, 2016

The Loudoun County STEM Day was another key opportunity for us to interact with our community to educate them about synthetic biology. During the event, we talked to many residents around our NOVA College campus about how synthetic biology is impacting the world and what our team is doing to help drive it. Many young students also came to the event, and for them we had a short activity on purifying DNA from strawberries and students were able to take home a sample of DNA.