CU Competes in International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition
The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, or iGEM, is an annual synthetic biology competition that pits teams from schools from all over the world against each other with the goal of winning one of many possible awards. CU 麻豆影院 has been a participant for the last couple years, 2015 being no different.
翱耻谤听 was the development of an E. coli based biosensor that could be used to detect naphthalene, a common additive to fracking fluid which is also harmful to people鈥檚 health. We had a small team that managed to achieve a lot, and learn a massive amount in the research process.
听In September the team members landed in Boston late the night before the opening ceremony of the 2015 iGEM Giant Jamboree. We had to give our presentation the next day, but luckily we weren鈥檛 scheduled to do so at 9:00 a.m., meaning we didn鈥檛 have to give up our much-desired sleep time on finishing our presentation.
After waking up early the next morning to go to the opening ceremony we hurried back to our rooms to start working on the final touches to our presentation, and get in some much needed practice. Despite making changes and not getting to run through the final version of the presentation until less than two hours before we had to present to the judges, our presentation went well and then we were free to watch other presentations and enjoy what else the Jamboree had to offer.
There were many presentations, and as the Jamboree came to a close the judges spent plenty of time deliberating on which teams were the best of the best in each category. The overall winner of the competition was a surprising one in the team from the College of William and Mary. Their project was the development of a new parameter, 鈥渘oise鈥 that could be used in the characterization of the biological parts used by every team who participates in iGEM.
听In the end, we were awarded a silver medal for our efforts, and some of our members were actually听听that was published using data collected for the iGEM interlab study.
, this time our project is focusing on integrating photosensitive non-canonical amino acids into Bacterial Microcompartments (BMCs) so that they can be broken apart and put back together on command, possibly for use in fields such as drug delivery.