USU Engineers Take Another Gold at iGEM Competition

Utah State University engineering students received a gold medal for their development of a new medium for synthetic biological advancement at the annual international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass.

The team competed against more than 1,300 students representing 136 teams internationally from some of the most prestigious institutions in the world including Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley and Stanford.

The USU iGEM 2010 team earned a gold medal in this year’s competition, making it two years in a row that it was awarded a gold medal.

“The fact that among these teams, which include the best universities in the world, we have been recognized for two consecutive years as gold medal recipients goes to show that the program at USU is highly respected,” said Alex Hatch, a undergraduate senior who also participated last year. “It's personally rewarding to participate in such successful projects.  I'm glad to attend an institution that trusts and invests in its students so that this opportunity is available.”

The iGEM competition seeks to improve manufacturing capabilities, or develop potential enhancement of drug-delivery systems through advances in synthetic biological engineering. Student teams work on their projects over the summer and compete each fall at the MIT campus. Teams give an oral and visual presentation of their work to a panel of judges, who rank them according to project usefulness, experimental design and part characterization. All parts characterized by teams are submitted to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, where they can be accessed by the public.

The iGEM competition was developed at MIT to promote Synthetic Biology research, specifically the construction, characterization and dissemination of standard biological parts called BioBricks. These BioBricks are essentially a programming language for DNA, allowing researchers to interface any constructed parts into a biological system. Projects and parts cover a wide range of applications.

The USU iGEM team submitted 43 total BioBrick parts to the Registry. The team was comprised of seven students, including five Biological Engineering Department students (Cody Tramp, Alex Hatch, Cole Peterson, Shujie Shen, and Brad Henrie) and two Electrical and Computer Engineering Department students (Eduardo Monzon and Abiezer Tejeda). Faculty advisors included professor Charles Miller, Biological Engineering Department Head Ron Sims, and USU College of Engineering Dean Scott Hinton.

“It was particularly rewarding when several scientists from national and international labs expressed interest in working with the DNA constructs built during our project,” said Tramp, a graduate student. “It’s amazing to think that in just a summer, a handful of graduate and undergraduate students designed a project that would be immediately useful to biological engineers from around the world.”
 

Miller led the team as part of the new Synthetic Biological Engineering program in the Biological Engineering department. The team's project, CyanoBricks, introduced a new chassis into the Registry of Standard Biological parts. CyanoBricks is essentially a toolkit for developing BioBrick applications in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis, while BioBricks have been almost exclusively developed in Escherichia coli up to this point. The team designed a cloning system based on homologous recombination, a consensus ribosome binding site based on a novel software tool they designed, and a variety of promoters for expression in Synechocystis. 

“The ultimate goal is to make it cheaper to produce bioproducts and ‘green’ fuels,” Miller said. “Unlike E. coli, cyanobacteria are photosynthetic and are capable of manufacturing their own food from sunlight and carbon dioxide. Hopefully down the line there could be a cost savings and presumably a cheaper source of energy.”

Writer: Max Dahl, 435-797-1356, m.p.dahl@aggiemail.usu.edu