A look back at the Open House Day of the IBGC (2025)

On Saturday October 11th, in the context of the 2025 edition of the science festival ("Fête de la science"), the IBGC opened its doors to the general public for an afternoon. It was the perfect occasion to discover the institute's activities and to participate in educational workshops revolving around fundamental research on microorganisms.

Suitable for 7 to 77-year-olds, the workshops covered a wide range of disciples, including banana DNA extraction, pipetting and dilution exercises and obviously coloring games! One could also observe Drosophila, yeasts or fluorescent E. coli under the microscope, or watch a slideshow revealing all the secrets of mitochondria. Many curious eyes were drawn to lab benches & equipment and visitors got the opportunity to discuss with members of the unit.

The CB&B team contributed with a workshop on bioinformatics & AI, which offered an educational, hands-on introduction to protein sequence alignment. Then, participants could assess the speed and usefulness of BLAST to perform the same task. Finally, a specific protein was selected and its 3D conformation was shown, overlaid with the AlphaFold prediction for comparison.

Our bioinformatics workshop was also featured on the "Fête de la Science" at Arlac, on November 22nd.

As a first experience, this was very exciting! Being able to share and exchange with the public was quite rewarding and the IBGC will repeat the exercise next year, so we hope to see you soon!

This activity was supported by the Région Nouvelle Aquitaine, the CNRS and the University of Bordeaux.