We are happy to announce that we supported the iGem Thessaloniki team, which won the top prize in the international iGEM Synthetic Biology competition 2019, organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
The project is called “POSEIDON” and it is a toolkit for the examination of DNA-Protein interactions. The iGem team of Thessaloniki deployed the first DNA computer able to quantify DNA-Protein interactions. This computer fulfills its design and deploys it towards research, providing novel solutions to basic science puzzles.
In particular, these interactions have major effects upon many phenotypic features, such as gene regulation and protein maturation, that rely on the identification of target sites in the genome containing distinct sequences. The clarification of these interactions and the conditions under which they are dissociated are of significant importance for many of the future applications that concern disease diagnosis, therapeutics, drug discovery, and many more.
The students were distinguished among 5000 competitor research teams from all over the world. The competitors were examined and rated by 120 world-famous judges.