INTEGRA Biosciences awarded 3 PIPETBOY acu 2 serological pipette testers to the 2023 iGEM Competition team at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU_BS) to aid their pioneering research in lithium therapy toxicity testing. Pipette testers enhanced the team’s pipetting accuracy and improved the multiple fluid handling tasks involved in this exciting project, helping them achieve their project goals.
The iGEM Competition is an annual synthetic biology event open to groups of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students from around the world and dedicated to advancing discoveries that will help solve some of the problems currently facing the environment and human health. Lithium-based treatments are highly effective mood stabilizers commonly used to treat mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder. However, lithium can be toxic at higher concentrations, making regular monitoring of lithium blood levels extremely important. Unfortunately, these tests must be performed by medical professionals in a healthcare setting, requiring frequent and inconvenient hospital visits and blood tests.
The TU_BS team’s Li+onSwitch project that aimed to investigate the possibility of creating a new method of self-testing that can be performed at home. INTEGRA supplied the laboratory with 3 PIPETBOY acu 2 serological pipette controllers in June 2023, as Daniel, a member of the iGEM 2023 team, explained: “A large part of our work involved designing our own plasmid constructs and testing potential reporter systems, and we worked extensively with liquid cultures. We were very excited to receive the PIPETBOY controllers and they quickly became essential daily tools in our lab, significantly speeding up our repetitive pipetting protocols. This huge cumulative time savings has led to greater productivity and enabled us to focus on other aspects of our research. PIPETBOYs are also extremely accurate instruments, so they have helped improve the reproducibility and consistency of our many manual liquid handling tasks.”
The iGEM Grand Jamboree was held from November 2 to 5 in Paris, and the TU_BS team was awarded the Best Diagnostics Project, Overgrad, as well as a gold medal. They were also ranked in the top 10 graduate groups and nominated for Best New Composite Part, Overgrad. These achievements are a testament to the team’s diligence over the past months.
