Contribution

To the iGEM community

Fundraising guide 2.0

Last year's iGEM Aalto-Helsinki team made a Fundraising guide for the iGEM community. Inspired by this, we wanted to start a tradition and add our own insights regarding fundraising, thus we created a Fundraising Helpbook to give more insight to the previously existing guide! You can find our fundraising helpbook from here.

Team Dynamics guide/insights

In our journey, we discovered that while scientific experiments may require precision, teamwork demands a little more flair. From accepting diverse opinions to managing the caffeine-fueled hustle of our busy days of iGEM, we learned that every member brings a unique shade to the palette of collaboration. In this guide / insights, we'll share the ups, downs and some humorous anecdotes of our experience, along with practical tips and strategies that we hope will light the way for future iGEM teams. See our team's colorful and chaotic world of iGEM from here.!

Protein Purification Trouble-shooting guide

Efficient cell lysis is an important step in protein purification, as it affects how much protein you get. This guide explains the key factors that can impact lysis, like cell type, buffer recipes, temperature and offers simple trouble-shooting tips to improve protein extraction. Check it out from here!

Collaboration on Sticker Book Collection

McMaster iGEM 2024 contacted us asking, if we would be interested in collaborating regarding a sticker book and we were delighted to say yes! As a result, McMaster put together a Sticker Book Collection, which has iGEM teams from over 40 countries. The book was created to promote mutual learning and foster dialogues around the world. The project provided a unique platform for teams to creatively share their project ideas in the form of stickers! Learn more about this from McMaster's wiki here. You can also see the Sticker Book Collection with this link: STICKER.

Survey templates

Our team conducted a vast survey for both cancer patients and non-patients (see more from Human Practices - Survey). To ensure that everyone has the material to conduct even the same survey, or if wanted, elaborate on ours, we exported our surveys as PDFs so that all the questions with answer rules can be reproduced. See both of our surveys below:

You can find our patient survey from here and non-patient survey from here.

Introducing synthetic biology and iGEM to younger generations

Even though Education has always been a part of iGEM and internet has established a great potential to reach multiple people across the world online, we hope that more iGEM teams would take a step back and recognize more widely those living in rural areas. With urbanization, at least in Finland, it is no longer profitable to keep services available to those living in rural areas, so people in increasingly have to travel to larger centers to do their shopping and go to school. To ensure that education is as diverse and equitable as possible, we wanted to create a workshop that could be later on organized in different locations with considerably low effort. We hope that our workshop Bioarts encourages more future teams to organize workshops and other activities for those also residing in rural areas and providing more open-source materials. More about Bioarts, and our open-source material regarding that at our Education page.

For the future Aalto-Helsinki iGEM teams

For the past approximately eight years, Aalto-Helsinki iGEM team has managed their fundings trough a certain Finnish bank. The problem has been language barrier, meaning that even though iGEM teams in Finland have been very international over the years, the only customer service language has been either Finnish or Swedish. This year, to give everyone a possibility to work with administration regarding funds, and to make sure the future teams have the best possible sources at hand, we went through the process of switching our bank to another, which provides their customer service and other services in English. We strongly believe that this change will enable better, more transparent fund managing. Also, having a physical bank card that works internationally, will make the travelling easier in the future teams.

For the Alumni of Aalto-Helsinki iGEM teams

Aalto-Helsinki has proudly represented Finland in the iGEM competition since 2014, marking this year our 10th anniversary participating in the iGEM. To acknowledge this, together with couple former members, we are hosting a 10-year anniversary Gala -event on 23.11. for the Alumni of Aalto-Helsinki iGEM teams. We are asking people to contribute to our online folder by providing pictures etc., that we can show during the gala. We are happy to host our event at our long-term collaborator's premises, at Terkko Hub!

New Parts

As part of our iGEM project, we contributed to the iGEM parts registry with a total of 13 new parts, which include 10 basic parts and 3 composite parts. These parts play crucial roles in the functionality of our drug delivery system. Each part is an engineered segment of DNA designed for specific functions, such as binding to cancer cells, escaping endosomal degradation, and releasing drugs at specific pH levels. We followed the BioBrick standard in our designs, ensuring that the parts are modular and can be easily assembled and integrated into various biological systems.

We were able to conduct basic wet lab experiments with all our composite parts, focusing on liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) formation and doxorubicin (Dox) conjugation. These initial experiments highlighted the functionality of our parts, though further testing and refinement will be necessary to optimize their performance. We hope that the insights gained from our design process will serve as valuable references for future teams interested in drug delivery and LLPS formation.

For a complete list of parts and links to the registry, please visit  our Parts page.