iGEM 2009

The Stanford team – teens and 20-year-olds – presented their summer project this evening.

They genetically engineered a pair of E.Coli bacteria to detect inflammation in the gut, and release Interleukin-6 for local treatment of IBS and Crohn’s Disease. These bacteria thrive in your colon, and they can be hijacked to be probiotic in novel ways.

The student’s engineered plasmids were a bit too much to jam into one bacteria, so they split the job across two bacteria (thing1 and thing2, as I like to call them), which required a novel signaling channel to be developed between them – a 5-methyl mutant of tryptophan. And IL-6 is too large to get across the bacterial cell wall, so they use two subcomponents for extracellular assembly.

And they were in competition with all the other student teams on the slide to their right.

Well, the results are in, and under Drew Endy & Christina Smolke’s direction, Stanford took the gold in the health/medicine category of the international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) contest. Woot!

See 2009.igem.org/Team:Stanford and the info in the red bar of links.

Professor Christopher Anderson at the University of California Berkeley commented: “This is, by far, the best use of synthetic biology as a therapeutic device that I have seen in a very long time.”

Each team contributes their genetic code to the collective library, literally paper pages of DNA, so future projects can build on the foundations of their predecessors.

For example, thing1 is a nitrous oxide sensor. I suggested that others might want to use it in the lungs for asthma management since this same biomarker is a great predictor of an impending asthma attack. The philosophy of iGEM, with its library of Biobricks, is open reuse, like LEGO bricks in an abstraction hierarchy, a subsumption architecture for science.

I first met with this team a few months ago, at the beginning of summer, when they were brainstorming about what they might do….

Gosh, I don’t recall doing anything quite this dramatic during my summers…