It's a little like "Pimp My Ride," Synthetic Biology Edition - just replace the wrecked car with a living cell and tricked-out gadgets with strings of DNA, and the reality TV show becomes the annual iGEM competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition allows teams of university students to play chop shop with living cells to give them special properties from individual handcrafted parts.
Brown sent two teams to the iGEM jamboree on Nov. 8 and 9, and the culmination of months of research and experimentation earned them three medals.
John Szymanski '09 and Aaron Glieberman GS won a silver medal for their development of a limiter, which regulates the level of gene expression in cells. A second team composed of Rima Shah '11, Neil Parikh '11 and Katherine Jacobs '10 developed bacteria with the ability to identify various toxins in water supplies. They received both a bronze medal and a best environmental project award for their work. On Nov. 8, 84 teams representing schools across the world, from Slovenia to Peru, presented their projects to the panel of judges and on Nov. 9, finalists gave another round of presentations before the winners were selected.
Most teams had upwards of 10 members, according to Professor of Biology Gary Wessel, iGEM's faculty adviser. He added that Brown's team was probably the smallest and most junior at the jamboree. Shah, Parikh and Jacobs had no previous experience with independent laboratory research. Parikh and Shah started their iGEM process as freshmen.
The DNA sequences submitted by competitors contribute to an MIT project to catalogue "BioBricks," highly specialized pieces of DNA. The goal of the BioBrick organization is to standardize all newly developed DNA parts to allow researchers in synthetic biology to build on each other's work. With no international standards in place to make sure these sequences correspond to a standardized start and end place, it is difficult for these scientists to work together.
Synthetic biology, which Glieberman described as an "infusion of engineering principles into biology," is a relatively new field. With teams addressing everything from vaccinations to fusion proteins, the annual jamboree is an embodiment of this field of study.
"Just being there, you can taste the immense possibility," said Glieberman.
Shah agreed. "It's mind-blowing."
Several of the participants said the field of synthetic biology deserves increased attention since, as Jacobs said, it is the "cutting edge of research."
iGEM members are currently spearheading a push for greater focus on synthetic biology at Brown by writing a grant for new faculty members. "It's something Brown really needs to hop on," Parikh said.
Though iGEM teams each develop their own biological systems, each one could theoretically fit together with any other, "like thousands of Lego parts that could build on each other in infinite ways," Parikh said.
The students easily put in a 40-hour workweek during the summer months, spending hours in their tiny basement laboratory, Wessel said.
"It's not a dungeon, but it's the next best thing," said Wessel of the lab, though some team members expressed an attachment to the old converted storage room.
"It became our second home," said Shah, recalling many nights spent nodding off against a small refrigerator, waiting for experiments to finish before heading off for a late night pizza bite.
Such space limitations reflect the many handicaps the team faced going into the competition. Of the 84 teams, many were under the guidance of professional synthetic biology research laboratories, which Brown does not have.
"It was our own ideas, our own lab meetings, our own problem solving," Glieberman said. "We were truly rookies starting from scratch."
