Students of Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, used INTEGRA Biosciences’ VIAFLO electronic pipettes and EVOLVE manual pipettes to perform sample transfers and dilutions as a part of their project for the 2022 iGEM competition. The pipettes helped the team to hurry up liquid handling and increase pipetting accuracy, giving the scholars a competitive edge over their peers. The iGEM Foundation is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of all areas of synthetic biology.
It runs an annual international competition where multidisciplinary teams of university students design, construct and test their very own unique research projects from start to complete.
The group at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU_BS) developed a self-amplifying detection system for the competition, which will be used to discover small amounts of tumor marker antigens in blood samples. This novel tool has the potential to contribute to the early diagnosis and treatment of many cancers, improving patient outcomes and survival rates in the long run.
Benjamin Harder, a student at TU_BS, explained: “We were the primary iGEM team at our university for a while so, until recently, we had only a number of outdated pipettes available to us. We subsequently decided to upgrade to INTEGRA’s VIAFLO electronic pipettes and EVOLVE manual pipettes. They’re well suited to our applications, as they permit us to rapidly adjust the meting out volume on the fly, making our liquid handling steps faster and more efficient than before, while concurrently minimizing manual errors and reagent wastage. This noticeably improved the accuracy and reproducibility of our results, giving us greater confidence in our findings.”
“Day-after-day working on our project within the lab was different and unpredictable, but INTEGRA’s products greatly helped us to take care of a few of the surprises and challenges we got here across as we got closer to the ultimate of the exciting competition,” Benjamin concluded. All teams presented their cutting-edge projects in the course of the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris, France, from the twenty sixth to the twenty eighth of October 2022, with prize winners being announced on the ultimate day. TU_BS was awarded a silver medal for his or her progressive project, a much-deserved reward for the group’s months of labor.
Visit the INTEGRA Biosciences website to learn more.