The iGEM Athens 2021 team with students from the National Technical University of Athens, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Agricultural University of Athens won a Gold Medal at the iGEM 2021 World Competition of Synthetic Biology, which took place online from November 4 to November 12 where the group presented its work. More than 320 teams and 4,000 participants from research teams from around the world took part in the competition.

The team, which consists of seven students, travelled to Paris and presented the AdAPTED project which comes to solve the problem of production of reagents used in PCR. To date, PCR reagents have been produced chemically and must be transported and stored at freezing temperatures, making it difficult to diagnose diseases such as COVID-19.

The final product of the AdAPTED project, provides a cheap and ecological alternative for the production of these reagents (the four dNTPs and a polymerase), and can be used for medical, research or educational purposes.

The complete work of the iGEM Athens 2021 team is presented on the official website https://2021.igem.org/Team:Athens, where all the criteria of the competition that were met for the gold category are analyzed.