Educating our Team Members

Input from leaders in academia

To engineer an appropriate solution for a real-world problem it is necessary to understand the scientific literature behind the project's methodology. During the summer before the iGEM conference, the MAVericks met with Dr. Ioannis Vizirianakis and Dr. Felichi Mae Arines, who helped refine our experimental approach.
Team meeting with academic leaders
We reached out to Dr. Vizirianakis, a professor of pharmacology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, so that we could learn more about the feasibility of our experiment and its more practical aspects. He aided us in looking into the applications of our project and whether it could function as a real-life product. As such, we looked into whether the project could be scalable, given our initial idea was to harvest linalool from dead yeast, and therefore be turned into a large-scale project. Furthermore, we were able to discuss how cost-effective the project is in itself, and in the case of an expansion.
Team members Matteo and Electra with Dr. Arines
Dr. Felichi Mae Arines
Postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard — First author of “An optimized protocol to analyze membrane protein degradation in yeast using quantitative western blot and flow cytometry.”
Following our discussion with Dr. Ioannis Vizirianakis we met with Dr. Felichi Mae Arines to dive into more specific aspects of our methodology. She reviewed our methodology and suggested improvements as well as quantitative assay alternatives that could be implemented given the lack of available resources. She proposed a southern blot assay for plasmid conformations instead of full plasmid sequencing, as well as the potential of using a coomassie blue stain instead of traditional anti-body based ones. She also guided us through Snapgene plasmid sequence map analysis, and advised us on using leucine deficient yeast to allow plasmid uptake. Based on her advice we adapted our transformation protocol to ensure efficient plasmid uptake and our extraction method to allow for scalable production of linalool and neroidol without harming the organism.

Education beyond our team members

1. Researcher's Night: On September 26, our team participated in “Researcher’s Night” at Thessaloniki’s Concert Hall, an annual event focused on familiarizing children with science and technology. Through our presentation, we promoted our project MAVericks and explained our team’s solution to student stress. We created activities that helped explain genetics and heredity; memory games, heredity models with gummy bears, and creating a DNA double helix from marshmallows with the kids that stopped by our booth. It was a hands-on way for children and families to understand and experience biology and genetics interactively.
researchers-night-2

2. Elementary School Visits: We ran hands-on sessions exploring microbiomes and the gut-brain axis.

We ran hands-on sessions exploring microbiomes and the gut-brain axis.

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Conclusion

Each of the activities organized, including our elementary school workshop, our ACSTAC booth with interactive games, the Bazaar presentations and memory games, and the experiments conducted with the participants of the Researcher’s Night, has been thoughtfully documented.

We developed detailed action plans, activity descriptions, printable materials that were being distributed to our audience and posts on social media to share our initiatives more widely. We created structured guides for the experiments and presentations that are freely accessible through our Wiki page, enabling future iGEMers to replicate them and adapt their team’s expectations to them for different age groups or local contexts. Our documentation includes photos of our team members working closely with younger students and explaining our vision, goals and proposed solution with simulations in simple, comprehensible terms, so that they can build upon our approach in their future teams.

Across all activities, we fostered curiosity about the competition and the iGEM community while promoting mutual learning in synthetic biology and other fields based on the work of each one of our departments.