Achievements

Bronze Medal

• We completed the registration for iGEM 2014.
• We completed the iGEM 2014 judging form.
• We completed the Change of Heart iGEM team 2014 wiki.
• We will present a poster and a talk on our project at the Giant Jamboree Jamboree.
• We have added and documented new parts,click here to view our parts in the registry.

Silver Medal

• We experimentally validated that our new parts work as expected.
• We documented the characterization of our parts, on the “Main Page” of its Entry in the Biobrick Registry.
• We submitted our new parts to the Biobrick Registry.
• Our main implication was on the safety of our project as it is in the field of Medicine & Health. One question articulated by our team was ‘How can we terminate our system in the case of an adverse effect occuring in the body?’ We approached this challenge by using autologous proteins present in the body already. We have also designed our parts under tetracycline regulatory operon therefore in the presence of tetracycline antibiotics, our desired proteins production will be inhibited.

Gold Medal

• We helped AUC-Turkey High School Team by mentoring and training them in their project including experiments, human practice and designing their parts.
• We also collaborated with METU Turkey team by giving them some of the biobrick parts present in the kit plates which they have ran out of.
• We used human practice as a gateway to approach and evaluate problems that are related to our project such as heart attacks and ischemia. We separated our approach into four modules. These are Identification,Clarification, Specialization and application. Our aim in these modules where to first identify the main causes of heart attacks, engage and inform people of the potential health risks, research and evaluate how many people are aware and what we can do to increase the number by getting in contact with related stakeholders and finally designating a proposed treatment cost. For more information please click here.

In addition to fulfilling all three medal requirements we:

• Are the first iGEM team to work on hypoxia using eukaryotic cells.
• Successfully worked our ODD, SOD, HRE, Kb-RE, Aprotinin and tPA in our engineered eukaryotic cells.
• Have created a system which aims to treat ischemia: the number one cause of deaths worldwide.
• Designed new biobricks such as NF-kB, HRE, Aprotinin and our favourite new part ODD and therefore have nominated ourselves for the best new biobrick prize.
• Have separated our P&P into four modules where extensive research and evaluation took place including surveys to our university students and iGEM teams equaling it up to a total of approximately 300 participants as well as holding several meetings with cardiologists and stakeholders to find alternative ways of raising peoples’ awareness.
• Have criticized our project approach in terms of treatment management and monitoring our safety and security! Several researches have been conducted about the-state-of-art clinical practice and methods to compare the new and old features.
• Have accomplished modeling our gene expression dynamics and have also come up with the unique idea of modelling our safety experiment which enables us to prove graphically that we are able to switch our system off in the presence of a simple antibiotic such as tetracycline.
• collaborated with the METU iGEM team and exchanged thoughts on how we can improve our modelling.
• Have explored the issues and factors resulting in Tissue Hypoxia and Ischemia.
• Will hold a special metaphor event called ‘Think By Heart’ during the Giant Jamboree where we discover the unknowns of our heart simply beginning from its etymology to the cardiac cycle and how it is bizarrely similar to us human beings in terms of its style of functioning and many more.