Each year, hundreds of student teams from all over the globe embark on an exciting adventure, exploring the world of iGEM. The iGEM journey is all about tackling challenges, nurturing creativity and growing by learning from mistakes made along the way. Each one of these hundred teams has a unique path in this competition, but all the teams face similar problems and share a common goal.

Our team has been through tough times and faced multiple problems along the iGEM journey. Addressing these problems brought us one step forward and helped us become better in many aspects.

In this page we share our own valuable insights we’ve gathered throughout our iGEM Odyssey, as a contribution to future iGEM teams!

For our project IRIS, our team has designed and assembled several Basic and Composite Parts, making valuable contribution to the iGEM community. From primers to complete transcriptional units, you can find our collection of Parts HERE

We also contributed by adding more information to an existing part (BBa_K1977000). We specifically provided more information that our team found important for our project.

Our Odyssey climaxed during Wet Lab experiments!

During our experiments we faced some difficulties concerning the isolation of pBBR1MCS-3, a low-copy-number plasmid we wanted to use as a cloning vector for one of our constructs.

Some might argue that spending a lot of time to solve this problem was a waste of time, but we view it as a valuable learning experience. We’ve put together a detailed PDF file with all the troubleshooting we performed on that matter because we believe it offers insightful advice on how to handle things going wrong during experiments, which could be helpful for many iGEM teams down the road. You can see and download our troubleshooting experiments in our wet lab notebook HERE

Our team decided to create the 'iGEM Greece 2023' server, a Discord server for all members of Greek iGEM teams. Our goal was to create a cozy space for Synthetic Biology enthusiasts where everyone can discuss their projects, ideas, dreams, and the overall iGEM experience.

The server includes several text and voice channels where people can chat, share memes, exchange interesting scientific facts, suggest ideas for changes in the Discord server, post photos and media related to their iGEM work, and listen to a 24/7 Lofi Music Radio.

Through our server, our team hosted an event called the 'Homecoming Party' to kick off the server's creation and we also provided every Greek iGEM team with the opportunity to host their own events.

The server also serves the purpose of facilitating collaborations between Greek iGEM teams. Private rooms can be created at any time, allowing teams to engage in meetings or other online activities.

We believe that our server will be used by the next generations of iGEM teams in Greece, as it’s a useful, yet fun tool for iGEM members to use for multiple purposes. You can see the server’s structure through screenshots down below:

iGEM Greece 2023 Discord server made by iGEM IOANNINA

As a part of our Human Practices, we wanted to involve the youngest audience possible in our goal of Education-Communication of Science. That’s why we created a PowerPoint presentation, specifically made for young children, which we intended to present in Primary Schools in Greece. Unfortunately, bureaucracy has not yet permitted us to make this presentation.

Highlighting the significance of alternative, informal educational methods, demonstrating that science can be accessible to everybody and introducing young minds in the universe of synthetic biology,
our PowerPoint presentation ‘Bacteria with Superpowers: A Kid's Guide to Synthetic Biology’ can be downloaded here