These guys are smarter than you: The medical researchers

This lot are saving lives whilst you’re skipping lectures


Whilst the rest of Aberdeen students are spending their November completing deadlines and preparing for their exams, six unique students have been working around the clock to come up for a cure for the disease known as “African Sleeping Sickness”.

These bright sparks are destined for great things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The team, made up of Ana-Maria Cujba, Konstantin Gizdov Jamie Long, James McAvoy, Joseph MacKinnon, and Martyna Sroka were competing in Boston last week against 260 teams drawn from Universities across the world in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.

The hard work of the six undergraduates was recognised at the competiton, with the grouping achieving the best team award in the ‘Health and Medicine’ track, and the ‘Best Synthetic Biology Measurement Approach’ prize.

Look at this clever young chap.

One of the iGem team members, Jamie Long, said:

“We all found out about iGEM in different ways, it was announced to me at the end of one of my lectures.

“I then decided to give it a go and I turned up for an audition in which all the interested people presented a synthetic biology idea to a panel of judges, my idea for the project was a bio-deodorant.

“Over the summer I stayed up in Aberdeen working in the lab on the project, but it worth-while.”

While most of us struggle to keep up with uni work and a social life, Jamie and his team members had a lot more to take on: “For me it juggling final-year uni work with all that can be tough at times.

Jamie explained to project to us in layman’s terms,the project was to design a bio-assay for the diagnosis of HAT/Sleeping Sickness, as current diagnosis assays are expensive and cumbersome. More information can be found on their website for any budding scientists.

Jamie saw the project as being a success, and for him it was an opportunity to learn more about synthetic biology and the lab techniques required to clone genes into plasmids; created a platform technology for the dual surface expression of epitopes that could potentially be used to diagnose an enormous number of diseases. Not your average day at uni then.

So much brain power in just one photo.

The team were exceptionally humble about their achievements:

“Most teams don’t win an award, so to receive two was unbelievable, we were all in shock afterwards.”

Congrats, guys.