Our project’s goal is to represent the universities of Grenoble at the international synthesis biologycompetition iGEM. This competition will take place at the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2019.

Our project’s aim is to create a system able to detect the presence of biomarkers in small volumes of non-complex fluids (tears, sweat, urine...). This idea comes from a conference given on June 2018by Mark Lew at the American Academy of Neurology’s 70th Annual Meeting, where he showedresults that a biomarker of Parkinson’s disease could be detected in the tears of a patient.

After a few months of researches, we realized that the idea of having a system only able to detect a biomarker for Parkinson’s disease was a reducing perspective and an idea that posed ethical problemsas there are no treatment for this pathology.That is why we enlarged our project to aim at creating a device that could be easily adapted to the detection of other biomarkers, and that could do it with as few manipulations from health technicians as possible.

Our project is then to create a system that automates the detection of all kind of biomarkers in reduced volume.In order to clarify the project, we will focus on the detection of only one biomarker that we know could be of interest for the diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease: the α−synuclein. This protein forms oligomers which concentration increases in the tears of patients with Parkinson’s.

This repository contains the whole develeopment process for the engineering team including both hardware conception and software development.