Hopkins bio synthetics team wins gold medal at IGEM competition
Ever wondered if it was possible to make E. coli smell like wintergreen or produce hemoglobin?
The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (IGEM), held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), challenges its participants to do just that.
"The whole point of the competition is to answer the question, 'can complex biological systems have interchangeable parts, or is biology just too complicated?'" senior and co-founder of Hopkins' IGEM team James DiCarlo said.
"It looks at the organism as a machine, and we basically use interchangeable parts of a genome to make an organism do what you want."
Hopkins' IGEM team participated in this year's competition and received a gold medal for its project.
The team was first started by seniors James DiCarlo and Allison Suarez in the fall of 2007 after they took a course over the summer called Build a Genome, taught by professor Jef Boeke.
"The course is a synthetic bio course, and during it, Boeke discussed the IGEM competition, which showcases synthetic bio projects. It sounded really cool, so we decided to start a club and make a team," DiCarlo said.
"At some point during my class, I mentioned the IGEM competition, and those two [DiCarlo and Suarez], got really fired up about the whole idea, and before I knew it they were cooking up a plan," Boeke explained.
Their plan was to make a better smelling E.coli through genetic modification.
"They decided that they didn't like the smell of E.coli and they started thinking about how they could make it smell better. Could we give them some genes that would make them produce some sweet smelling compound? We started thinking about maybe wintergreen or banana smells," Boeke said.
And then, when the winning IGEM team that fall was announced, DiCarlo and Suarez were stunned. One of the big winners at the competition had been a team at MIT whose project had made bacteria that produced a banana smell and a wintergreen smell.
The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (IGEM), held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), challenges its participants to do just that.
"The whole point of the competition is to answer the question, 'can complex biological systems have interchangeable parts, or is biology just too complicated?'" senior and co-founder of Hopkins' IGEM team James DiCarlo said.
"It looks at the organism as a machine, and we basically use interchangeable parts of a genome to make an organism do what you want."
Hopkins' IGEM team participated in this year's competition and received a gold medal for its project.
The team was first started by seniors James DiCarlo and Allison Suarez in the fall of 2007 after they took a course over the summer called Build a Genome, taught by professor Jef Boeke.
"The course is a synthetic bio course, and during it, Boeke discussed the IGEM competition, which showcases synthetic bio projects. It sounded really cool, so we decided to start a club and make a team," DiCarlo said.
"At some point during my class, I mentioned the IGEM competition, and those two [DiCarlo and Suarez], got really fired up about the whole idea, and before I knew it they were cooking up a plan," Boeke explained.
Their plan was to make a better smelling E.coli through genetic modification.
"They decided that they didn't like the smell of E.coli and they started thinking about how they could make it smell better. Could we give them some genes that would make them produce some sweet smelling compound? We started thinking about maybe wintergreen or banana smells," Boeke said.
And then, when the winning IGEM team that fall was announced, DiCarlo and Suarez were stunned. One of the big winners at the competition had been a team at MIT whose project had made bacteria that produced a banana smell and a wintergreen smell.
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