Medal criteria

Bronze

Registration and Attendance at the Jamboree

A dream come true! After our registration in May, and a really educative research summer, we managed to register our team members at the Jamboree and we hope we will meet you there too!

Deliverables

All of the competition’s deliverables were completed
Wiki: we created and filled with the documentation of our project
Poster: ready for the Giant Jamboree and beyond! Presentation: After many different tries, our final one will be proudly presented at the Jamboree.
Judging Form: we completed all the required forms and fields

Attributions

We documented and gave credit to everyone that contributed to our project in any way in our Attributions page.

Project Inspiration and Description

We thoroughly described the various inspirations as well as the possible implications of our project.

Characterization

We characterized some commonly used terminators using an established method. We characterised BBa_B0012, BBa_B0015, and BBa_B0010. You can read about our Measurement.

Silver

Validated Part

We validated the functionality of parts of our project: The AND gate containing the antibiotic cassette, the Inactive Hammerhead ribozyme from S. mansoni, and the Cpf1 optimised Hammerhead ribozyme

Collaboration(s)

We participated in multiple collaborations, ranging from soil sample collection to art representations of SynBio. Furthermore, we established the Aptamer Hub with various other teams, a place for iGEM teams working on aptamers to create knowledge foundations and contribute to aptamer and aptazyme research. You can find more information about our collaborations here.

Human Practices

After extensive literature search concerning bioethics and biosafety, we expanded our knowledge further by coming in touch with scientists working in the field of aptamers, directed evolution and bioethics. We also raised awareness about Synthetic Biology across different groups (public, students, scientists). More information about our stance on bioethics can be found here and about our public engagement here.

Gold

Integrated Human Practices

As the axis of our integrated HP work we set the concept of Access to Science. We developed our whole project from the beginning on with the aim of providing an accessible working framework in a new technology such as aptamers. During our research we also developed an accessible morbidostat and new techniques. Furthermore, we conducted interviews (more here) by coming in touch with stakeholders and analyzing our qualitative data. Also, we developed the concept of a community lab in Greece, and considered the issue of accessibility of information and science communication.

Model

The initial step of our proposed protocol, Alt-SELEX, involves software that models the docking of aptamers to a target molecule. We also created a complex differential equation model of our circuit, proving that our concept does work, and used the results of the modelling to improve the function of our wet lab design.

Improve a Part

We improved part BBa_K1893013 - STAR, created by iGEM Imperial College 2016, by conjugating it to a HHRz molecule, thus creating a new type of regulatable RNA molecule.

Demonstrate

We provided evidence that our prototype MEDEA plasmid can be assembled, transformed into bacteria and isolated successfully after appropriate selection with antibiotics. Furthermore, we demonstrated the machine enhancement of an initial aptamer sequence using bioinformatics approaches.

Final Results

We are proud to say that our team won a gold medal in this year's iGEM Competition and was also nominated for Best New Application project! We feel extremely pleased with these results, which were only made possible thanks to all amazing people that worked and cooperated for it! Apart from these long-awaited prizes, the iGEM Competition gave us priceless memories, unprecedented experiences and wonderful new friends. We would like to thank everybody - our PIs, instructors and advisors, and of course our lovely fellow iGEMers - who formed part of our journey!

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