This summer, as some Brown students traveled the globe, relaxed out in the sun or otherwise enjoyed their time off College Hill, a small, passionate group of students elected to remain at Brown, indoors and playing with Legos - complex, microscopic, living Legos, that is.
Members of Brown's entry in the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition, hosted annually by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spent their summer designing and building tiny living gadgets with highly specialized functions. The Brown delegation earned gold medals for their project - bacteria that glow bright green in the presence of lead.
"Certain bacteria have a sensor built into them specifically for lead, so what we did was to take the lead sensor out of that bacteria, put it into E. coli and have it send out a signal," said Deepa Galaiya '08, a member of Brown's iGEM team. "Once the cells received the message, they all started to glow green."
The competition, which promotes undergraduate research, is built around BioBricks - highly specialized pieces of DNA catalogued by MIT researchers - that promise to influence the emerging interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology.
"When you build a bridge, you have standard parts - nails, screws, screwdrivers - and you can buy them at a hardware store," said iGEM team member Glen Scheinberg '08, drawing an analogy to genetic engineering. "Imagine if every time you wanted to design a bridge you had to figure out how to thread the screw and build the screwdriver."
The ground-up approach usually used to create genetically engineered microscopic machines such as the glowing lead detector consists of tedious and expensive processes with complicated steps. But BioBricks - and the MIT registry that houses and classifies them - may prove to be synthetic biology's great "hardware store."
"Each (BioBrick) is like a piece of Lego," Scheinberg said. "They can stack onto each other, and each piece fits with another."
"Every time anyone makes something, they break up their project into BioBricks that are put into the Registry of Standardized Biological Parts at MIT," said Tito Jankowski '08, a team member and self-described "iGEM evangelist."
"Now, anyone can go to the Registry and get a part that will say, 'If you include this part in your system, it will make your cells glow,' " Jankowski said.
A biomedical engineering major with eyes for entrepreneurship, Jankowski praised the competition for its ingenuity and the research experience it provides to undergraduates.
"Most people, when they do research, have a professor who tells them, 'You should do this, you should do that,' " he said. "iGEM isn't that at all. Not only did we have our own lab, we figured out exactly how to do everything ourselves."
Galaiya, a biophysics and international relations double-concentrator who came up with the glowing-lead-detector idea, said the team entered the 10-week competition with very little knowledge of how to run a lab, let alone the specific protocol for cutting and pasting DNA from one cell to another.
"My job over the summer was to make sure we had ordered all the chemicals and reagents," Galaiya said. "I'm used to working in a lab where all the reagents are just there - I don't think about where they come from."
After weeks of preparation, a steep learning curve and a $25,000 sponsorship from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, the team joined over 50 other delegations in early November at MIT's "iGEM Jamboree" for two days of project presentations.
Scheinberg and Jankowski recounted some of the more clever projects presented at the Jamboree.
"One of them was called BactoBlood," Scheinberg said of the project from the University of California at Berkeley. "It was using bacteria as red blood cells. They were able to genetically engineer them so that they wouldn't be attacked by the immune system, but were able to carry oxygen like red blood cells. And that's important, because there's a blood shortage right now."
"MIT had a similar project to ours, but with mercury," Jankowski said. "They created a sheet of paper that was covered with cells, and these cells would pick up mercury in water. It's a revolutionary way because it's so cheap."
Though the Brown team missed out on the grand prize - a BioBrick-shaped trophy won by Peking University for their UV-light-sensitive biological circuit - they returned to campus with gold medals awarded to the top third of competitors.
"They're typical gung-ho undergraduates wanting to change the world," said John Cumbers GS, the team's graduate student advisor. "They really see that they're into something that's going to be huge in the future."
Cumbers is currently a TA for BIOL 1940: "Synthetic Biological Systems," a new multidisciplinary class that introduces students to the "cutting edge field of biological engineering."
"Synthetic biology is still a very new field - in its infancy, really - and iGem is five years old," he said. "In another five years, what we're doing now will seem primitive."
"I think iGEM epitomizes Brown," said Professor of Biology Gary Wessel, who teaches BIOL1940. "Some of the iGEM teams in the world are driven by faculty. What's special about the Brown team is that it's completely driven by students."
Wessel, a faculty advisor for Brown's iGEM team, said the new wave of outside-the-box thinking characteristic of students like Galaiya, Jankowski and Scheinberg has changed the way he thinks about his own biological research.
"My job has always been to break a cell apart and get it down to something I can control," Wessel said. "iGem and synthetic biology is just the opposite. You start off with almost nothing and create something that you can then make use of."
