This summer, the Franklin Public Engagement team, alongside staff and students attended the UKRI-STFC Daresbury Open Day on Saturday 15th July and bluedot festival from 21st to the 23rd July, where we were Making Molecular Movies – explaining the benefits of studying molecules and cells in their native states.
With visitors to these events, we discussed why and how we are trying to see inside cells with greater detail. Explaining how these discoveries can lead to new insights in biology which hopefully will lead to new treatments for diseases.
Our stands focused on our work in liquid cells – creating real-time molecular movies. This will allow us to watch interactions happen inside the cell, such as medicines in action. You can read more about our liquid cells, as well as some of the other work being conducted by our Correlated Imaging Team, here.
At our stand, visitors were thinking about the different types of cells in our body and where they are found, explore how we can see inside cells, and make their own molecular movies using our snow globe cells with researchers from the Rosalind Franklin Institute.
Everyone’s favourite activity was creating negative images where attendees acted as our electron microscopes and imaged some of our ‘proteins’.
The Daresbury Open Day was a chance for members of the public to step inside Daresbury Laboratory and Sci-Tech Daresbury to find out more about the science and research that is happening there . The Daresbury laboratory is the sister site to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, where the Franklin is based.
Bluedot festival celebrates science and music in three-day festival at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire with a wide variety of speakers and exhibitors.
If you were unable to make it, we have created an online tutorial on how to make your own edible cells at home.
We want to take the opportunity to thank all of our staff who joined us, the event organisers and all of those who visited and spoke to us, we had some great feedback from you all.
