This is already the second time, when our school has an iGEM Team. This fact helped to make our environment understand what this project means. Nevertheless the challenge was huge and in this case we are extremely grateful
to school governors, our teachers, the School District's Science Laboratory and all the other persons we mention below, as they made it possible to work under fully supporting circumstances.
The story itself started in January, when seven students in our Special Biology Class decided to form a team. Three other students joined us one month later. As first step we have consulted the former team members in order
to understand how iGEM works. We especially thank to Akos Marton, Mark Harangozo and Gergo Nikolenyi (members of Hungenious Team of 2014) who advised us not to give up when difficulties are arisen.
2) Project support and advice
The opportunity that we could reach our main goal is mainly based on the fact, that the School District's Science Laboratory functions also as the Biomedical Education Centre of Szeged Scientists' Academy. The laboratory is
fully equipped with all the devices which we needed during our work. The only equipment which we used outside the school was a Nanodrop which was provided through the courtesy of Department of Pathology at University of
Szeged thanks to Prof. Farkas Sukosd.
We received many advices from several experts, namely Lori Giver, researcher at Calysta Inc., Prof. Gabor Rakhely (Head of Department of Biotechnology at the local University of Szeged), Sergey Stolyar, Associate Professor at University of Idaho, Prof. Alexander M. Rubtsov (School of Biology at Lomonosov Moscow State University) and Anindya Sinha, Professor at National Institute of Advanced Studies at Indian Institute of Science Campus (Bangalore, India). You can read the details at our Integrated Human Practices homepage.
3) Fundraising help and advice
As we are students in a state maintained school, fundraising was crucial point in our successful project. There were four main resources which summed up to be able to cover all the required costs finally. As a secondary
school student, we were not allowed to handle so huge amount. Therefore the main responsibility in this task was undertaken by our PI, Sandor Ban. Some of our mates has helped a lot in filling forms for the several
grants.
The four resources were as follows:
a) Registration fee was covered by Szeged Scientists' Academy.
b) Lab costs was covered by the School Districts's Science Laboratory and the Association of Hungarian Biology Teachers.
c) 80% of the Jamboree costs was covered from a state maintained grant for talented youth
d) the remaining costs of the Jamboree was covered by a market based company.
4) Lab support
As all the members of the scientific subgroup in our team attend a Special Biology Class, thus we were ready to carry out basic molecular biology methods, such as micropipetting, using gel electrophoreses devices, PCR and
spectrophotometry and working under antiseptic conditions. Nevertheless, research differs in many ways from a school lab activity in which everything is prepared by the staff. We had to be in touch with the idea that during
the project everything should be done by ourselves. Pouring agar medium and agarose gel for electrophoreses, handling dangerous material, and genetically modified organisms, furthermore sterilizing tools were taught us by
the lab staff from step to step for which we are really grateful. We would like to say thanks to Andrea Borbola our second PI for her practical ideas when we got in trouble, to Aniko Gulyas for her industry to prepare all
materials and to help us in sterilization process, and to Laszlo Kiss for his contribution in preparing the inorganic solutions we used.
5) Difficult technique support
Usually we carried out all steps on ourselves, but especially in the gel extraction process we were advised by Andrea Borbola to handle the equipments in a good manner to avoid the destroying the DNA by UV-light.
6) Project planning
Project management was the duty of Mate Duda, a team member who was advised by his father, Erno Duda, founder, President and CEO of Solvo Biotechnology Co.
7) Wiki support
The webpage was created and managed mainly by Mate Torok, a team member, who receivesd instructions to deal with the navigation bar from his brother, Peter Torok, Deputy Managing Director at http://mozaweb.com. Akos Sukosd,
Adam Halko, Mark Tarjan and PI Sandor Ban has also gave a huge contribution to edit the webpage.
8) Presentation coaching
This was offered will be carried out by Erno Duda founder, President and CEO of Solvo Biotechnology Co.
Acknowledgements
We would like to say special thanks to Gábor Rákhely, Ph.D., head of Department of Biotechnology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He provided us valuable help during planning and carrying out the experiments. He showed us the way of plasmid designation and also arranged us to be able to use the modular broad-host-range expression vectors, which were baselines in our project. Andrea Borbola, the assistant manager of the school laboratory and her collegue Eniko Gulyas lab assistant also meant a valuable help for us. She supported our project with her practiced pieces of advice and was always there, even on Sunday afternoons, when we needed help. We would like to say thank for Lori Giver Ph.D. and Sergey Stolyar, Ph.D. for giving us priceless help in cultivating and transforming the bacteria. Thank you also for Biomatters Ltd. for providing us the molecular biology designing software, Geneious, which was a really helpful tool in our project. Thank you for the Szeged Scientists Academy for ensuring us the possibility to take part in the iGEM 2017 competition.
