The interdisciplinary team of Aristotle University students, the iGEM Thessaloniki will be traveling to Boston in a few days. The university team will compete for the first prize in the International Synthetic Biology Competition. Representing Greece, they will present there their pioneering work. MIT hosts the competition annually in order to encourage students to design and build biological systems that could solve major problems.
Specifically, the seven students have designed a biological system that achieves regulated expression of desired proteins of the organism. This system,used in research and industry, has many implications in other areas as well. These include health and therapeutics, production of fermentation products, etc.
Members of the team
The team consists of the students Ioannis Alexopoulos (Department of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Alexandros Giannopoulos (Department of Pharmacy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Yvonne Giannoula (Department of Pharmacy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Pantelis Kyriakidis (Department of Informatics AUTH), Grigorios Kyrpizidis (Department of Biology AUTH), Panagiotis Karatakis (Department of Informatics AUTH and Yvonne Xesfiggi (Department of Chemical Engineering AUTH).
Supervising professors are Ioannis Vizirianakis, associate professor of the Department of Pharmacy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Georgios Mosialos, professor of the Department of Biology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Dimitra Dafou, assistant professor of the Department of Biology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Synthetic biology’s principles and techniques
“Synthetic biology is a modern scientific discipline that combines classical techniques of molecular biology with principles of engineering in order to solve major problems and to promote scientific research. In health and pharmaceuticals, synthetic biology can be used to produce pharmacomolecules from genetically modified microorganisms (e.g. artemisinin from yeast), for localised drug delivery (e.g. cancer tumours) and many others (antibiotic resistance, immunotherapy and gene therapies, vaccine development, etc.),” stresses Ms Giannoula.
She explains that “with the system we have created we have achieved stable and accurate expression of proteins by eliminating some of the uncertainty factors of biological systems. In other words, we achieve stable protein expression by making it independent of the number of plasmid copies present in the bacteria.”
It also states the following. “In this way we reduce variations in gene expression. We can optimise the efficiency in the production of molecules of interest on both laboratory and industrial scales. In addition, our system optimizes the performance of metabolic pathways by maintaining the stoichiometric ratio of participating enzymes and intermediates. Of course, it is applicable in gene therapies where expression control is essential.”
Previous participation and distinction
It is the second Greek participation in the competition. The first team won a gold medal for year 2017, and were nominated for the “Best Therapeutics Project Award”. Now it is time for iGEM to take the lead.
“We are very happy that this arduous but highly educational course is coming to an end. Looking forward to representing (as the iGEM team) the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and presenting our work, we’ll face great competing teams”. Ms Giannoula stresses and adds. “This year we aim to surpass last year’s achievement. With the help of the previous team, as well as the guidance of the supervising professors we’ll proceed. We believe that our participation is vital in the competition even in such difficult times. Many other obstacles may occur, such as not having the appropriate laboratory experience. With proper guidance and hard work one can set ambitious goals and achieve them.”
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Author: PC-GR
The World of Technology
