Description

It is no news that African teams face obstacles in their iGEM journey, which explains why only 2-3 teams participate every year. We tried not to let these obstacles affect our progress as much as possible, but some matters were really out of our hands.

The start

The first thing is that no one in Egypt works in the field of synthetic biology. It was hard whenever we faced something that required the help of an expert. We did everything through self-learning from scratch, with the guidance of our instructors who previously participated in the competition in 2019. This is why we did not start with the normal iGEM cycle in March because our journey required a long learning phase that began in June 2020. Our road was both long and tough, but we learned a lot.

Fundraising

Not only does no one work in the field here, but there is also no common knowledge about Synbio. Neither professors nor organizations knew about the field, which made it hard for us during our fundraising because no one understood the concepts upon which our project is based. We had started searching for sponsorships even before our team registration, and among the +150 companies we reached, only two companies agreed to sponsor us.
The fundraising process wasn’t easy at all, there were weeks when we would go to about 20 or 30 companies a day, but it sadly always resulted in the same disappointment.

Team registration

Our only hope was to get help from our Faculty and University. Dr. Faten Nour Eldein (Our PI) stood by us from the very start, she pushed through the endless paperwork as much as she could and organized various presentations to our professors and dean so they would trust us enough to help, but it was never that easy. Eventually, the faculty finally agreed to provide us with the team registration money.
However, it took us a whole month to finalize the transfer, not to mention that wire transfer is the only method allowed here, so every single payment to iGEM would go through the same process in signing papers and going to numerous organizations. We would like to thank Kitwa for providing us with all the papers we asked for during that stage.

Customs

After the registration, it was mainly between searching for the fund and trying to focus enough to proceed with the project. When it was finally time to get our distribution kit, a new but expected obstacle made its appearance, customs.
Customs regulations here in Egypt are very hard, it is even harder for scientific shipments. The distribution kit remained for a whole month in customs. One of the creative team members went every day to the airport to finish the required papers, every single day that passed cost us money, time, and effort that could be saved for more important matters.
Three months later, we found out that we had it easy with the distribution kit, as the IDT grant (our parts) broke all records and stayed in customs for 56 days. Nearly two months of trying to get our parts to start the wet lab work, asking for help from every single person possible. A huge delay in our plan, and continuous stress every day for each team member. The shipment finally got released in mid-September, giving us a short time to carry out the protocols.
We would like to thank IDT for their patience during this process and for responding to the countless emails we have sent them.
After finally getting the IDT grant, there was one thing left, the Promega grant that had some very essential reagents for our experiments, we ordered it in July, and it still hasn’t arrived yet.

Team tickets

Another fund issue faced us when it was time to pay the tickets’ fees, if it wasn’t for us winning the impact grant, we wouldn’t have been able to pay them and continue our journey as we had started to request this money from our University in July, but never got the acceptance until late September.
Even the remaining 500$ we didn’t have and asked Kitwa to postpone their payment until the payment of each person’s ticket.

Jamboree

However, getting the money from our university was conditional, they would not provide us with any fund if we were not to travel, we cannot travel if they do not contact the French embassy here in Egypt to get us or Visa, and the cycle goes on.
We would go every day and try to get the embassy paper to be sent, we would face an issue, try again the next day, and so on.

Labwares, equipment, reagents, kits.

Any labware you expect was either lacking or expired in our lab, starting from the restriction enzymes up to the ethidium bromide or the electrophoretic cells. We have contacted every doctor we know to get the cloning and expression strains and the antibiotic. After that, we found out that plasmid miniprep kits are expired.
Every protocol we ran needed to be repeated at least three times and each time we would discover a problem in an expired reagent.
In the end, we settled to work with two restriction enzymes from different companies and optimize the reaction conditions with multiple trials and errors, all of this is done in less than one month. We even had to collect money from the members to purchase gloves and tips.
A solution may pop up in your mind right away that we should order them, but this is not even possible because the process of ordering the kits or reagents from either the distributor or the company itself will take not less than 6 months due to custom clearance procedures when it will be already past the time of wiki freeze and giant jamboree.

We are writing this when the wiki freeze is three weeks away. By the time each team was filling their criteria, preparing their presentations, and ready for the Jamboree, we didn’t even know if we were going to attend or we are not, and no wet lab work to put in the wiki. Promega shipment was destined to arrive after the wiki freeze, but we refused to give up, and we were going to fight until the very last minute. This is what I love about my team. During the tough time, it was normal to lose hope. Nevertheless, we would fight till the end and refuse to surrender to these hardships. It is amazing what creative solutions can come up during hard times. The magic of troubleshooting a scientist could have. It was normal for us to repeat the same process again and again to finish the needed paperwork. We would have 10-to-14-hours meeting daily, trying to catch up and adapt to the obstacles we faced every single day. When it was hard with fundraising, we started collecting money weekly from each team member to cover our simple needs, like materials for events and internet access for the dry lab work. There was a time when we did an event catering by ourselves because we were short on money and wanted the event to come out as good as possible. Hard work is not only physical, anyone can imagine how mentally exhausting this could be for a person, but we all had one goal, that at the end of the journey, we would have done everything in our ability, so that no matter the final result, we know that we tried the best of our best to get there and help the people that are suffering all around the world from a killer disease like Alzheimer’s.