All India iGEM Meet 2022 is the biggest congregation of all the iGEM teams from India. AIIM 2022 was hosted from 23rd July 2022 to 25th July 2022 by the iGEM Teams of IISc Bengaluru and was sponsored by Promega, India, Coca-Cola, India, and IISc Students' Council.

The three-day event consisted of a series of talks by iGEM Alumni, iGEM EPIC, iGEM league, and iGEM Ambassadors, project and poster presentations by participating teams, a fireside chat with Varsha Jaisimha, Global Ambassador of iGEM, and many more recreational activities. The in-person AIIM after two years was very exciting for all, and Team-IISc’s hospitality was indeed touching. Our team was involved in moderating the fireside chat and iGEM EPIC sessions.

Project Presentation and Poster Presentation gave us a pre-Giant Jamboree experience where the judges appreciated the novelty of our idea, asked us questions regarding neural chip and dry lab aspects of our project, and gave us some valuable suggestions. We looked up to their suggestions which helped our project greatly. Also, our team had an amazing experience meeting and discussing with the other iGEM teams.

Team iGEM Patras brought forward the idea of collaborating and making an educational video over iGEM, synthetic biology, wet lab, and dry lab.

All the teams answered questions regarding this topic in their native languages, which helped us reach out to people from different regions speaking in different languages. It was really exciting to work together on this.

To learn more about this, please check our Education section.

We contributed one art form as a creative expression for an art magazine that iGEM ASU was developing for the community. They proposed this wonderful idea of creatively expressing Synthetic Biology with the help of art forms which could play an instrumental role in helping students understand the concepts.

To learn more about it, check out https://2022.igem.wiki/asu/collaborations.

We collaborated with iGEM IISER TVM and showed around the labs we work in as we wanted to let people understand the kinds of love and safety precautions we taking care of. We truly loved the idea of featuring our labs and had a great time filming them.

You can checkout the video here.

We participated in the Global collaborative effort undertaken by Queen's University to develop a fun book over favorite bacteria we contributed to it by writing about some fun facts about our favorite bacteria E Coli.

In these exceptional times iGEM team QGEM came forward with a great initiative on social media to celebrate “International Day of the world's indigenous people” to celebrate and amplify the accomplishments of the world's indigenous people as a team from India we featured about Dr. Gagandeep Kang an eminent virologist.

The collaboration with iGEM IISER Berhampur was short but pleasant. We discussed our project and appreciated how both projects use Aptamers as biosensors to tackle infectious diseases. Their project was aimed at diagnosing UTI infections, one of the most common bacterial infections, affecting 150 million people each year worldwide. Although both teams worked around Aptamers, the detection method was quite different.

We discussed between us about using the sequences already available in the literature for designing our aptamers and suggested IISER Berhampur Team do the same as they were considering performing whole -Cell SELEX, not knowing the actual protein that aptamer is binding to, which would be difficult to do and would be time-consuming. They took our suggestions positively, and we had a wonderful time discussing the project's various other aspects. We always supported each other on social media and promoted each other’s work, thus forming a great bonding between us.

Meeting iGEM AFCM Egypt, who are around 4920 km away from us after several postponements, was worth the wait. They were also one of those teams who worked with aptamers to diagnose Phenylketonuria which is estimated to affect globally 0.45 million individuals with a Global prevalence of 1: 23930 live births. We discussed our project with them and further discussed in length the development of our neural chip and how convoluted neural networks could be used to develop aptamers.

We decided to remain in touch to discuss further the convoluted neural networks method for aptamer generation but couldn’t get to do much over this. However, iGEM AFCM Egypt happily agreed to collaborate with us to conduct the Survey on GMO and Syn-Bio and translated the survey into Arabic so we could reach people from different geographical regions speaking different languages.

We had a great time collaborating with Team Linkoping Sweden. They were also working with Aptamers like us, and their project focused on the early detection of neurodegenerative related to mtBIs. In the initial meeting, we discussed our projects and gave valuable feedback to each other. We also discussed the approach we were considering using for attaching aptamers successfully. iGEM Linkoping also helped with ordering our DNA order from IDT as they were already done with that and this made it easy for us to order and get our aptamers on time.

It was a nice experience to meet High School ASIJ Tokyo. Both of the teams shared their project and we advised ASIJ Tokyo to perform molecular dynamics in addition to molecular Docking as part of their dry lab simulations. We also discussed which Docking software/server to use in which situation - we learned that HDOCK gave them good results. They suggested that our project presentation should focus more on the neural chip and not on the Diagnostic aspects, since it's a foundational advance. They also raised some important points regarding the ease and feasibility of implementation such as cost and accessibility. We also discussed education and communication - how to reach out and better explain synthetic biology and our projects to middle and high school children.

We met iGEM Thessaloniki and discovered that although our project seemed quite different, we worked on similar ideas in our dry lab aspects. Both of the teams decided to collaborate in Dry lab and Hardware Modeling.

In our meeting, we shared our ideas and expectations from the collaboration more clearly, and our dry lab team agreed to help them with Molecular Dynamics Simulation. Our dry lab team decided to perform MDS over the sequences they provided and help them with the modeling. Hence, it helped both teams have a great time collaborating.

We collaborated on modeling the stability of one of their Y molecules. This molecule was a hybrid molecule of three strands of DNA. We obtained the primary sequences for the molecules. We ran into the first problem of converting the primary sequence into a 3D structure. Using base pair complementation, we made an annotated sketch of the 2D representation of the molecule. The second problem we ran into was the generation of the PDB file for the molecule. Because the structure contained multiple strands, we could not directly form the structure using online servers. We did a thorough Literature search and found an article that described writing the dot-bracket format for a multi-strand complex of DNA. We performed this manually and uploaded the dot-bracket structure of the complex on 3d RNA/DNA Xiaolab online server. This generated a PDB file of the required complex.

We then equlibriated the complex at 300K and noted the Temperature vs time graph. This provided proof that the complex is stable at a temperature of 300K.

iGEM Thessaloniki helped us by providing us with an idea to model the reaction kinetics of binding of aptamer and target protein.

We had a great time discussing our project with the high school theme iGEM NanJiang Worldshaper.

Our team suggested they work on their projects' dry lab and Hardware aspects.

The team asked us to collaborate, and we tried to mentor them to help them overcome the difficulties they faced while deciding their dry lab goals. In the initial meeting, we discussed several aspects of the project, especially the dry labs and hardware. Our dry lab team followed up with them and, based on their wet lab aspirations, advised them to perform Docking between PFOR and O2 to show the binding. We also suggested they perform a Michaelis Menten modeling based on the Docking results they will get. Hence it was a pleasant experience to help them.

The idea of conducting a Survey on GMO and Synthetic Biology was put forward by our Team as we wanted to understand the public's perception of genetic engineering and synthetic biology's applications worldwide. Although the times have changed, and its widely reported that GMOs and the use of synthetic biology are now more acceptable in society than ever before, we wanted to analyze how different people belonging to different age groups, gender, regions, educational qualifications, and walks of life think about it. We also tried to understand whether the perception of people changes toward GMOs and Synthetic Biology based on their field of application. We also assessed people’s willingness to learn more about biosafety and synthetic biology, which helped us decide our objective for Outreach events.

When we perceived this idea, we put it forward over Global Slack Channel, and Team-IISER TVM, Team AFCM Egypt, and Team- Patras showed interest in joining us to conduct this Survey. We believe this survey could also help future iGEM teams understand how people will perceive the application of GMO and Synthetic Biology.

Please visit our Education and Communication section to learn more about this survey.

BioSafety is important to reduce the health-related risks associated with handling infectious agents, toxins, and other biological hazards in a laboratory setting. Knowing and following basic protocols while working in a laboratory can play an important role in protecting lab workers, the environment, and the public. Our survey anticipated that majority of participants of the survey have a positive outlook on GMOs and synthetic biology but are worried if Biosafety measures can be properly ensured or not. They are also interested to know more about it. We also thought that iGEM teams exhibiting the biosafety protocols to be followed in a laboratory setting could help squash skepticism regarding the biocontainment and use of GMOs and synthetic biology in society.

The video is also educational for the students in STEM as it helps people learn about the safety precautions they should take for their co-workers and their safety. When we perceived this idea, we shared it over Global Slack Channel, and Team Athens, Team Patras Medicine, Team- MIT - MAHE, and Team- Estonia TUIT showed interest in joining us to create it. It was a pleasant experience to collaborate with these teams, and everybody put up a great effort in explaining the importance of each protocol that should be taken while working in the laboratory.

Please visit our Education and Communication section to learn more about this.