Berkeley Synthetic Biology iGEM* Team
(*International Genetically Engineered Machine)
Converting plant debris into gasoline, taking photographs with a living biofilm, curing disease with engineered cells—these are all projects from the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. Modeled after robotics competitions, iGEM teams construct living organisms using the tools and principles of synthetic biology. This year’s Berkeley iGEM team is a group of undergraduates, and a panel of mentors competing against other teams from all over the world to construct the most innovative and useful new organism. In October 2009, the team will present their project at the iGEM Jamboree held at MIT. In past years, the Berkeley team has taken home top prizes for their work on an addressable communication system in bacteria and for developing Bactoblood, a low-cost red blood cell substitute derived from engineered microbes.
Synthetic biology is a ground-up approach to genetic engineering. We design DNAs and add them to well-characterized organisms to solve problems in bioenergy, healthcare, chemical and materials production to name but a few applications of this emerging field. Much like software engineering, we are an information-based discipline except we program in A, T, C, and G (adenine, thymidine, cytosine, and guanine, the main nucleobases found in DNA and RNA), rather than 1’s and 0’s. In essence, our field is trying to learn how to program in the language of life—DNA—and use that knowledge to solve real-world problems.
The team is attacking the information and construction bottlenecks in synthetic biology by building on the idea of standard biological parts, or BioBricks. These short snippets of DNA sequence encode the basic building blocks of genetic programs. Like LEGOs, the parts can be snapped together into larger genetic circuits that rewire cells with new functionality. Our iGEM team is divided into a computational group developing new software tools for designing these genetic programs while our wet team is hard at work in the lab using the new tools to rewire cells. Join our students on their quest for discovery as they discuss their projects, their progress, and their ideas for the future of this exciting new field.
