Award for MPI Magdeburg researcher Teimurazi Gochitashvili

iGEM Gold Medal for a Microbial Fuel Cell System which senses a Cancer Biomarker

January 18, 2023

Teimurazi Gochitashvili, currently working as a Ph. D. student at the research group Process Systems Engineering at the Max Planck Institute Magdeburg, was awarded together with his students team of the French university University of Évry-Val d'Essonne (Paris – Saclay University) a gold medal at the iGEM, a prestigious competition in synthetic biology.

The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is an international competition for students, high school students, entrepreneurs and community laboratories in the field of synthetic biology with 410 registered teams participating in 2022. It is organized by the foundation of the same name and aims to encourage students to conduct independent and innovative research while still at university. In the field of synthetic biology, researchers reconstruct existing biological building blocks or recombine building blocks from different living organisms to explore and engineer special biological properties.

The team of the master students around Teimurazi Gochitashvili developed a microbial fuel cell (MFC) system, which senses a cancer biomarker and, upon detection, transmits the information via IoT-hardware (Internet of Things). This ambitious project is related to Teimurazi Gochitashvilis current research project at the MPI Magdeburg in the research group of Prof. Kai Sundmacher, under supervision of the leaders of the Biological Production Systems team Dr. Ivan Ivanov and Dr. Lado Otrin. Here he investigates extracellular electron transfer (EET) proteins that mediate signal transmission to IoT-hardware. He aims to develop a de novo protocell model for modulating EET in microfluidic systems.

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