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- Plasmids: a small circle of dsDNA
- Carbon storage
- Photosynthetic membrane
- Gas vacuole
- Energy storage
- Flagella/cilia
- Transport proteins
Report of attendance at the August 8th Thursday Local Market:
On Thursday, August 8th, three members of the Microbestiary team (Erin Bentley, Sara Griffith, and Emily Armitage) participated in the Thursday Local Market in Laramie. We facilitated activities that allowed children to build a suncatcher in a petri dish that represented a model of a microbial cell. Kids added differently shaped and colored organelles, and read about them in an accompanying brochure Emily put together that had a brief description of their functions of. Additionally, our booth had a station to build a Winogradsky column in a small mason jar using water and mud from the Laramie River. The type of organism that could be found at each level once the mud in the jar sediments was also detailed in the brochure. We asked parents of children that were involved in the activities to send us a photo of the progress of their Winogradsky column and a photo of their suncatcher hanging in a window so that we can post them on our website.
We had great engagement from the children present at the market throughout our time there. Many parents were interested in the Microbestiary as a whole, asked great questions about our mission, and were happy to allow their children to participate in our outreach activity. We made a connection with a representative from Laramie Soap Company, who is willing to display artwork or posters, and might be open to a collaboration. We also connected with an educator from Laramie High School that asked if we did educational outreach to 9-12th graders, and offered to pass along our information to the science teachers at the high school. We ended up handing out 25 pamphlets, and kids made in total 22 Winogradsky columns and 29 suncatchers.