iGEM Victory

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a synthetic biology competition for undergraduates that was started in 2003. This is the first year BYU has "fielded" a team (Matt founded it). The team has been working since last fall, and this past weekend we traveled to Indianapolis to present our project at the Americas Regional Jamboree.

We hit the road at 5:00 am to get to our early flight from Salt Lake City.

Once in Indianapolis, our main job was to prepare our power point presentation. We attended the jamboree with 64 other teams from the US, Canada, central and south America. Each team presented their project to an audience, and a panel of judges. Our presentation wasn't anywhere close to ready when we landed in Indiana, and we spent hours practicing in a hotel room to polish it up.

BYU's 2011 iGEM Team in front of our poster, left to right: Devin S., Chet C., Matt B., Julie R., Julius A., and Addison A. All are undergraduates at BYU.

You may be wondering what is meant by "synthetic biology," and what sort of projects emerge from an iGEM competition. Well, synthetic biology applies engineering principles to biological applications. iGEM teams engineer cells to do cool stuff. For example, Yale's iGEM team this year isolated an antifreeze protein from a Siberian beetle. The protein binds to small ice crystals in water, keeping them from forming large crystals and killing the cell. The iGEM team from the University of Washington created an enzyme that breaks down gluten around 100-times better than a commercial enzyme that is currently in clinical trials. This sort of enzyme is used to treat gluten intolerance in human patients.

iGEM projects range from agricultural topics, to medicine, to technologies useful in colonizing Mars. Most projects stay in the hypothetical realm. The goal of the competition overall is to develop the theoretical framework, lab techniques and safety of the field of synthetic biology.

Our project, cooked up at BYU, was a hypothetical colon cancer detector. The idea was to output a fluorescent signal when two specific biomarkers were detected: heat, and reactive oxygen species (ROS ... not to be confused with ROUSs from the Princess Bride). Our claim to fame was our method of detecting heat. We used a strand of RNA already found in nature and engineered it to have a very narrow operating range. The natural version is stable at 30 deg. C and unfolds at 37 degrees, which is an operating range of 7 degrees. Our engineered version is stable at 35 deg. and unfolds at 37 deg, which is a 2 degree operating range. Why is that cool? Well, 1) it's never been done before and 2) a more specific heat sensor is more useful than a less-specific one.

It was a bit intimidating to compete against teams like MIT, Yale and Stanford. We were so excited to see the results on the last day - we won a Gold Medal and were selected to move on to the World Jamboree in Boston in November! The Gold medal represents a quality standard of our work - many teams received Gold. But not all Gold goes to Boston :)