The iGEM Competition

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The iGEM Competition
Ben Althouse, Pete Morcos
How to Win Winning is even tougher than it
sounds. Drew Endy has commented 4 that, a year
after the systems built in that first MIT class
were deemed unsuccessful, he finally observed the
faint signal showing that they were indeed
working. In 2005, the first iGEM competition had
no overall winner as the 13 teams faced the
difficulties of refining the immature toolkit
available to them. Many awards of varying
seriousness are granted at each Jamboree. In 2006
the Slovenian team of 8 students won the Grand
Prize. Their inhibitory network limits the
mammalian immune response to bacterial infection,
which can lead to sepsis if it is too excessive.
The team created 26 BioBricks. The Berkeley 2006
team of 7 students (2 in high school) won Best
Device by improving the riboregulator 5 system
to assign cells unique RNA sequence addresses.
These sequences self-bind, preventing ribosome
attachment. When a plasmid with a matching key
is received, the RNA unfolds and transcription
proceeds in that cell alone. In principle, this
idea allows a directed communication network to
be established, analogous to the way neurons are
connected to each other. Most groups use
bacterial cells. Visual projects are popular,
such as E. coli photo film or edge detectors.
Groups that dont finish implementing their
systems can still win awards for parts of their
work.
The International Genetically Engineered Machine
Competition Its roots lie in a 2003 MIT class in
which students designed a blinking light made of
E. coli, an improved version of the Elowitz and
Leibler repressilator 1 biological
oscillator. Since then, iGEM has grown to 37
international teams in 2006. The long term goal
of the competition is to help establish the
synthetic biology field 2 by using and creating
techniques that can be shared by others. It is an
undergraduate competition, but high school and
graduate students also participate. Teams of a
few to dozens of students receive DNA BioBrick
parts (see box) required for their project and
present results six months later at the iGEM
Jamboree at MIT. Teams pay a fee of a few
thousand dollars and work at their home
institution, often funded by an outside sponsor.
The Slovenian teams kidney cells show a
diminished response when re-exposed to bacterial
flagellin at 6 hours.
BioBricks The major contribution made by
iGEM competitors is not necessarily their overall
project, but the DNA sequences from which it is
built. By combining and sometimes creating genes
and regulatory elements, components with new
reusable functionality are created. A key feature
of BioBricks is that their ends are standardized
so they can be joined to other BioBricks. The
Registry of Standard Biological Parts 3 is a
public resource for storing information and
physical DNA for these components. A few thousand
are currently available. It is expected that in
the near future DNA synthesis will be cheap
enough that sequences can simply be delivered
electronically. The Registry was founded by Tom
Knight as an attempt to recreate the standard
part libraries he was familiar with in his
earlier work on computer architecture.
BioBrick BBa_J45996 expresses GFP during the
exponential phase of E. coli growth. A
stationary-phase promoter (green) leads to an
inverter (blue, a tetR gene followed by a
tetR-bound repressor), which leads to a GFP gene.
Berkeleys cell addressing system. Plasmid key
sequences only activate cells with a matching
lock sequence.
Open Source Biology A hidden goal of iGEM is to
seed a community that treats bio-information as a
public resource. In 1980 the US Supreme Court
ruled that genetically engineered organisms could
be patented 6. Since then, some have opposed
such ownership of genes, genomes, and organisms
7. Sites such as OpenWetWare.org also exist to
make protocols public. The teachers of the MIT
class that became iGEM, all non-biologists, have
played major roles in this movement. Gerald
Sussman was a cofounder of the Free Software
Foundation. Drew Endy advocates bringing the
methods of open source software to biology, and
Tom Knight started the BioBrick registry.
iGEMs Future Participation in iGEM is
accelerating, with nearly 100 teams expected for
2007. Groups often continue working on their
projects after the Jamboree, and several schools
have established new curricula as a result of the
contest. For now at least, iGEM prizes dont
carry a monetary award. iGEM so far has been a
success at its goals of validating synthetic
biology, establishing public domain resources,
and educating participants in the methods and
risks of engineering organisms.
References 1 Elowitz, M. and Leibler, S., A
synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional
regulators. Nature. 403, 335-338, 20 Jan 2000.
2 Endy, D., Foundations for Engineering
Biology. Nature. 438, 449-453, 24 Nov 2005. 3
http//parts.mit.edu/. 4 Morton, O., Life,
Reinvented. Wired. 13(01), 2005. 5 Isaacs, FJ,
et al, Engineered riboregulators enable
post-transcriptional control of gene expression.
Nat Biotechnol. 22(7), 841-7, 2004. 6 Supreme
Court Case DIAMOND v. CHAKRABARTY, 447 U.S. 303
(1980). 7 Open Source Biology (editorial).
Nature. 431, 491, 30 Sep 2004.
EE 546 BioCircuits! Spring 2007