We started in October 2016 as iGEM Team Greece. A team never seen on this competition before, as there was no previous undergraduate team participation from Greece on iGEM. This meant that “The Road to Boston” would have to be “mapped” by us for the very first time!
But it didn’t scare us. Our team worked hard on facing obstacles despite our inexperience regarding the competition. Thus, we are very proud that we are able to declare, now that we are actually reaching Boston, that the entirety of our project was conceptualized, planned and implemented by the team members!
In spite of the fact that the statement above really fills us with joy, we could not but express our deeply thanks to the people that were there for us, during our journey.
- Dr. Spyros Petrakis (instructor) for his support and advice on cloning and transfection methods.
- Dr. Paul Hadweh (instructor) for his advice and aid on troubleshooting.
- Elisavet Lioulia (instructor) for her help on conducting Real - Time PCR to confirm the candidate miRNAs.
- Eleni Gounari and Aggeliki Malamidou (advisors) for their guidance with regards to biosafety and the use of the flow cytometry.
- Prof. George Koliakos, Prof. George Mosialos, Assistant Prof. Dimitra Dafou and Associate Prof. Dimosthenis Sarigiannis for their constant advice and guidance. Especially Prof. George Koliakos (Biohellenika SA) and Prof. George Mosialos and Assistant Prof. Dimitra Dafou (Department of Genetics, Development and Molecular Biology, School of Biology, AUTH) for providing us with their laboratory space and equipment.
- Assistant Prof. Efstratios Kosmidis for his help on our Quorum Sensing model.
- Prof. Chlichlia Katerina (MBG, DUTH) for providing us with the PerkinElmer EnSpire Multimode Plate Reader for our InterLab measurements.
- Ira Dika and Vasilis Barahanos for filming and editing our team’s videos.
- The Manzins for voluntarily transforming the concept of our project into art.
Erwin Schroedinger, in his 1944 book “What is life?”, theorizes that biological systems are auto-organized and feed on free energy.
Our team constitutes a true example of Schroedinger’s words, as despite our inexperience - being the first Greek collegiate team to have ever participated in iGEM competition - much like a biological system we sustained ourselves and worked hard towards our goals for the competition though self-organization and by “feeding on our free energy”.
