Team:Bulgaria/OurStory

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Our Story

It all started with the returning of Boris Kirov to Bulgaria. Since he already has been advising the team Evry 2012 in France, he decided to create the first Bulgarian iGEM team. In the beginning of February 2016 he introduced some of his university students to the main concept of Synthetic Biology and the iGEM competition. Among them was Mario Markov – the team leader. Motivated by the idea for the first Bulgarian team, taking part in the iGEM competition, they started to search for other members. They introduced iGEM to the universities and the moment for Natalie Atanasova, Evgeniya Mihaylova, Dimitar Cholakov, Petar Antov, Dzheny Pavlova, Krasiyan Nedelchev and Nikolay Krumov to join the team came. Once after the team was formed, the difficulties started to come. The biggest ones were finding a laboratory, all the money for the registration and spreading the idea for Synthetic Biology. Moving through all the media, interviews, thinking for a project idea and more members, they announced to the universities and team’s page for it.

Right after that Nikolay Gadev, Desislava Popova, Ilka Tsvetkova and Gergana Tzankova joined the team. There were a lot of people and companies, ready to help. After discussing a lot of amazing project ideas, including ‘’communicating’’ with bacteria, rocket fuel production and plastic eating protists the big one came. It was the perfect opportunity for a prоjеct concerning one of the most valuable bacteria in yoghurt – Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. Bulgaricus. We got familiar with a big problem during the lyophilization process of this microorganism – the fact that many cells die in the process. So we decided that We should try to solve it. However, lab work and research were not the only tasks that We had in front of us. We had to find money to support our project. We started selling T-shirts with our logo to gain money for the finals. There were many presentations in our universities, meetings with companies, taking surveys.

Our team held a number of events in the lab we are working in and involved students from various academic institutions. We popularized science in several high schools as well as in three of the biggest universities in the country. To educate people we went out in the busy streets of Sofia and showed people 3D models of cell organelles as well as structures of DNA and various proteins. That provoked interest in many of them and they were fascinated by synthetic biology and our innovative project.

Our public engagement drew the attention of major Bulgarian media (BiT, Nova TV, BTV, Boomberg, BNR, newspapers and online newsfeeds) which gave us the opportunity to educate publicly from the TV screens about the benefits from and the science that goes with genetically modified organisms. As a result of those broadcasts a lot of people contacted us and we organized meetings in several cafés where we answered all of their questions.

All these months were hard for us but when you put your heart and soul in one amazing project like iGEM at the end when the result come, You realize that everything was worth It. We hope that the book with our story will continue to be written in the future. And We hope that this book will inspire many other authors to write their owns until even a whole library will be too small to contain them.