World DNA Day

On 25 of April our team participated in iGEM Patras Medicine creative venture, a photo collage to celebrate World DNA Day. The idea was to collect photos of iGEM teams' members, holding a letter representing each of the DNA bases (A, T, G, C). Just as DNA bases join together to create the genetic code, so all of iGEM team members create the synthetic biology community.

World Environment Day

On 5th of June our team celebrated the World Environment Day with iGEM Vilnius. On 29th of May we received an invitation to participate in their project about a photo contest for the international Environment day. More specifically, the concept was to send a photo near a river, sea or pond in our local area, since iGEM Vilnius this year is focusing on the water pollution problem. All the members of our team were gathered in front of the local Thermaic gulf, which is also called the Mediterranean gulf, to celebrate World Environment Day.

Cancer Survivors Day

The first celebration of Cancer Survivors Day was held on June 5th of 1988. Due to this occasion iGEM Patras Medicine invited our team to collaborate and share an informational post about cancer. Cancer should not be faced with fear, but with courage, optimism and hope. 15.1 million cancer survivors have lived more than 5 years after diagnosis and of course up to 15.1 million lives could be saved by implementing prevention, early detection and treatment strategies. Sharing in our projects the common goal of the early detection of Lung

Cancer offered us the opportunity to collaborate together, aiming for the provision of information about this crucial disease.

IJET project

On 15th of June we received an invitation from iGEM Aachen and iGEM Patras Medicine to participate in their project called “IJET”. The purpose of this project was for every team to make a small video around 1 minute long, talking about the reasons for participating in iGEM competition and our innovative solution to an existing problem using synthetic biology. Many other teams contributed from all over the world and the result was indeed amazing. Our project DIAS, is a diagnostic tool for the detection of lung cancer in early stages. About the reason we participated in iGEM competition? It doesn't even need a conversation. iGEM competition is the biggest Synthetic Biology contest in the world and iGEMers are building a better world by solving problems with the help of Synthetic Biology.

Pre Aegean Meeting

On 28th of May iGEM Patras organized a pre-Aegean zoom meeting for all the Greek iGEM teams, in order to interact with each other and discuss our projects. During this zoom meeting, we first participated in some icebreaker games to get to know each other better, and afterwards every team presented their own project. After every presentation every team had the chance to ask questions about the presented project. The purpose of this meeting was to meet each other, present our projects, share experiences and difficulties and finally to troubleshoot in general. The meeting closed with a constructive conversation between all the members and many wishes for another live iGEM meeting.

Dry lab collaboration

On 17th of June, our team met for the first time iGEM Bulgaria team for the discussion of a potential collaboration. After getting to know each other better, we proceeded to the presentations of our project to find a common research interest for the collaboration. We discussed a lot of matters related to iGEM Competition for brainstorming and problem solving. Finally, we decided to take our time to think about topics for our collaborations.

On 18th of July we arranged a second meeting in order to discuss any ideas for our possible collaborations. Both of the teams were interested in research topics, so we focused on microfluidic technology since it is the common ground for our projects. Microfluidics have a wide range of applications, so we decided that each team should make a 45-minute presentation about the microfluidic technology. The topic we decided to present was the 3D printing manufacturing of microfluidic chips and declaring its advantages and disadvantages. The 3D printing techniques that were presented by us were the Digital Light Projection (DLP) and the Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), since they are the most common processes of 3D printing microfluidic device manufacturing.

After considering the discussed topics about microfluidics and the familiarity we had, we decided to meet in-person in Thessaloniki. After knowing each other better and discussing the difficulties that any iGEM team may encounter, we decided to take our collaboration one step further with the investigation of the microfluidic chip properties. We decided to manufacture the same microfluidic platform with different manufacturing techniques and therefore materials. We would utilize DLP printing technique with a transparent resin and the iGEM Bulgaria would manufacture a custom-made PDMS chip.

The design of the microfluidic platform was based on our design, so we decided to test them to the same flow conditions to investigate the difference of the droplet diameter and its dispersion. The design was based on the microfluidic design proposed on our model page. The design had 3 inlets, 2 oil inlets and 1 water inlet aiming for the water in oil droplet generation. The width of oil inlets, water inlet and outlet were 400,500 and 700 μm respectively. These dimensions were chosen since the DLP technique has resolution limitations. Unfortunately we didn't proceed with the evaluation of these microfluidic chips due to limitations with the pumping system.

“The SynBio Voice” PodCast

On 14th of July, we had the honor to take part in a collaboration hosted by our dear partners, iGEM Patras Medicine "The SynBio Voice" Podcast is an initiative to promote the iGEM Competition through Spotify and the iGEM teams. We were the first iGEM team to be on their podcast, and it is safe to say that our hostesses organized a wonderful interview. We talked about our project, our goals and everyday life in an iGEM team. For one day we grabbed the microphones and shared our voices!

World Lung Cancer Day

On 1st of August our team collaborated with iGEM Patras Medecine and created a poster for World Lung Cancer Day in order to raise awareness about the different types of lung cancer, the rates of each type and the main symptoms that are associated with the disease. Proper information and early diagnosis save lives! In the hope that cancer one day could become a chronic curable disease.

“Instagram Reels Project”

On 20th of August we had the pleasure to participate in a collaboration organized by Korea_HS team. Each team had to make a small video around 20 seconds introducing their members and presenting the basic idea of their project. However, the highlight part of the video is the moment that each team had to pick a word that better describes the team spirit. Our team chose the word “cooperation” and we have to admit that making this video was a lot of fun.

“iGEMers Badge Project”

On 20th of August our team got invited to a new collaboration from the Korea_HS team. This time the project aimed at creating badges for each team. Thus, we had to be imaginative and creative in order to compile a colorful and unique badge.Our team had a blast creating our badge and we loved being a part of such a whimsical project.

Ocean Video

On 29th of August Copenhagen iGEM team invited us to take part in a collaboration video from which the main reason was the emphasis of the oceans' importance and significance . The concept was simple and creative. Each team had to record a brief video in front of a water body, expressing an emotion that describes our feelings about it, in our mother language, national language, Greece. The word we chose was serenity, or else the Tranquility of a Blue Mind!

Applications of Synthetic Biology in Diagnostics

On 17th of September our team and Patras Medicine team organized a collaboration in order to highlight the contribution of Synthetic Biology to Medical Sciences and specifically in the Diagnostics field. For this reason we selected pictures from several iGEM teams working on a diagnostic project during their experiments and created the final result.

Workshop: A step closer to the gold medal: Bioinformatics and Graphic Design Edition

On the first of September, we organized with iGEM Patras Medicine, an educational online workshop called “One step closer to gold”. The purpose of this workshop was to educate not only members of the iGEM community but also other students at different universities. The workshop was divided into 2 main parts.

The first part of the workshop was an introduction to bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is a crucial part for both projects ours and Patras Medicine, so we wanted to point out the importance of finding the statistically important molecules that are overexpressed in Lung Cancer and are capable of functioning as biomarkers. After explaining the fundamentals of this scientific topic, we demonstrated the pipeline of acquiring and analyzing the available data. We made an introduction into the R programming language and analyzed a dataset from Gene Expression Omnibus.

The second part of the workshop was a demonstration of the utilities provided by Adobe Illustrator. Graphic design plays a crucial role in a team's presentation and overall, to project promotion. This part was taken up from iGEM Patras Medicine with the goal the provision of the basics for designing posters and general images. The workshop was informative and provided hands-on experience, demonstrating the general process of Graphic Design.

Closing this online workshop, we gave the time for the attendants to express their questions not only about the workshop's topics but also about the general function of iGEM competition.

Conference: “Synthetic Biology Approaches in Cancer Translational Research”

Our constructive interaction with iGEM Patras Medicine team gave us the idea of organizing a seminar together as co-hosts. After many meetings and opinions exchange, we decided that the one-day conference would be based on the applications of synthetic biology in cancer translational research. Thus, on 19th of September members of iGEM Patras Medicine team came to Thessaloniki and our meet-up came to life taking place in KEDEA (Aristotle University Research Dissemination Center). In this seminar we had invited many notable researchers from different universities located in Greece and Cyprus. Great speeches were conducted regarding the contribution of synthetic biology to precision medicine and especially to the field of cancer. More specifically, our speakers were:

And we are more than grateful for their participation in our seminar. Furthermore, our team and Patras Medicine team presented our projects, and the audience had the opportunity to discuss with us their thoughts about our work and generally learn more about iGEM competition.

Modeling collaboration

Considering that one of the most crucial parts of an iGEM project is the in-silico analysis, we decided to collaborate with iGEM Patras Medicine to succeed our goal. During our journey through iGEM competition, we had a meeting with iGEM Patras Medicine and after discussion we thought about collaborating for dry lab purposes. To be more precise, we shared the common goal of designing a molecular diagnostic that will detect RNA biomarkers. Keeping that in mind, we collaborated on constructing a model for discerning the best candidate sequences based on their thermodynamic properties. The utilized software was the ViennaRNA, and we guided them with its utilities of RNAfold, RNAcofold and RNAduplex. We provided details about the importance of Minimum Free Energy structure and the calculation of the binding energy between the two molecules and finally with the Concentration dependency plot, a plot that demonstrates the concentration of the complex based on the initial concentration of the reactants RNA.

Considering improving our models and moving one step ahead, we decided together to delve into Molecular Dynamics simulations for our systems. We understood that Molecular dynamics could give insights about the stability of our systems which is crucial for their appropriate function. They helped us on building a model for RNA-RNA Molecular Dynamics with the software oxRNA and we provided details about the needed steps of molecular dynamics of Protein-RNA with the software GROMACS. We discussed the results of our simulations and shared literature with each other to interpret the simulations' results appropriately.

The final part of our collaboration was on the reaction kinetics. Having utilized the MATLAB programming language to model the behavior of our system, we provided to them the MATLAB script and we pointed out that the most crucial part of the reaction kinetics is to compare the in-silico results with the experiments.

Visiting iGEM Skepsis

On 28 September 2022 three members of our team visited Anatolia College in order to meet the High School iGEM team, Skepsis. They welcomed and guided us to their working laboratories. As our team consists of members that have previous experience in the laboratory and in an iGEM team, and in contrast iGEM Skepsis team comprises high school students that take part in the competition for the first time, we conducted an extensive conversation about the iGEM competition in general and more specific about wet lab and dry lab troubleshooting, fundraising and the wiki page design. In both teams 3D Printing methodology is a crucial part of the project, thus the dry lab members discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the different 3D printers that each team uses. Moreover, as Dimitris of our team is an expert on 3D printing, shared some tips with the other team on purpose of making the use of this method even cheaper. As there are three iGEM teams in Thessaloniki, fundraising for iGEM Skepsis team was not a convenient procedure. For this reason a member of our team that is more familiar with fundraising, shared with iGEM Skepsis some tips on how to approach a sponsor, advice that could be useful even on a late stage of the competition. As far as the wet lab concerns, we discussed the problem that they face on immobilizing the enzyme of use on their device. They are searching for a chemical reaction, thus we advised them to search more specifically the bibliography about hydrophobic interactions between the two chemical parts that they use. We closed this really interesting meeting by sharing our thoughts about the final project presentation in the Grand Jamboree in Paris. To conclude with, this meeting of the two Thessaloniki teams was very constructive and pleasant as we exchanged knowledge and ideas with young and ambitious i-Gemers!!