Students win gold for glowing mold
Chaz Firestone
Issue date: 11/16/07 Section: Campus News
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."
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."