Versatile Pipettes Selected for Prestigious International Competition

Students of Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, used Integra Biosciences’ VIAFLO electronic pipettes and EVOLVE manual pipettes to perform sample transfers and dilutions as part of their project for the 2022 iGEM competition. The pipettes helped the team to speed up liquid handling and increase pipetting accuracy, giving the students a competitive edge over their peers.

The iGEM Foundation is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of all areas of synthetic biology. It runs an annual international competition where multidisciplinary teams of university students design, build and test their own unique research projects from start to finish. The group at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU_BS) developed a self-amplifying detection system for the competition, which can be used to identify small amounts of tumour 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 term.

Benjamin Harder, a student at TU_BS, explained: “We were the first iGEM team at our university for some time so, until recently, we had only a few outdated pipettes available to us. We therefore decided to upgrade to I Integra’s VIAFLO electronic pipettes and EVOLVE manual pipettes. They are well suited to our applications, as they allow us to rapidly adjust the dispensing volume on the fly, making our liquid handling steps faster and more efficient than before, while simultaneously minimising manual errors and reagent wastage. This noticeably improved the accuracy and reproducibility of our results, giving us greater confidence in our findings.”

“Every day working on our project in the lab was different and unpredictable, but I Integra’s products greatly helped us to deal with some of the surprises and challenges we came across as we got closer to the final of the exciting competition,” Benjamin concluded. All teams presented their cutting-edge projects during the iGEM Grand Jamboree in Paris, France, from the 26th to the 28th of October 2022, with prize winners being announced on the final day. TU_BS was awarded a silver medal for their innovative project, a much-deserved reward for the group’s months of hard work.