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Over the weekend, one of the most prestigious student research contests took place in the labyrinthine halls of MIT’s Stata Center. 2008 marked the fifth year of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, in which 84 teams created anything they could think of, using the techniques of the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Over the next three days, Bostonist will be giving everyone a crash course in this new biological frontier.
So what is synthetic biology, exactly? Basically, it’s the process of genetically redesigning an existing biological system to give it a new function. Flash back to one of last month’s Beaker Hill columns, in which we recounted the story of having tried to engineer bacteria to target cancer cells, and you have the basic idea. (Incidentally, that was a project presented at MIT for iGEM 2006.) Generally, it involves taking a gene of interest from one organism and incorporating it into the DNA of another, so that you have created a hybrid critter capable of doing something it wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.
However, researchers in synthetic biology usually think less like geneticists and more like engineers. A movement headquartered at MIT has attempted to provide some standards to the field, by creating a Registry of Standard Biological Parts. One day, they hope, just as a mechanic can pull a set of standard parts off the shelf to fix your car, a genetic engineer will be able to gather some standard pieces of DNA off the shelf to create a biological machine. (More on this Friday.)
Obviously this has the potential to be a very powerful tool in combating disease, coping with environmental disasters, and numerous other areas. As you’ll see tomorrow, freed from virtually any guidelines, the teams we talked to Saturday night were able to come up with a remarkable variety of projects. Technology Review profiled one of the iGEM projects last week, Rice University’s BioBeer, and of course we had to check this out for ourselves. It wasn’t finished, of course: a common theme at iGEM is that the timeframe is short enough that it is extremely difficult to get everything done unless the project was continued from a previous year.
Anyway, the kids at Rice introduced a genetic circuit—a set of genes in which the proteins produced by one gene control the next, and so on—into brewer’s yeast. The goal was to make unfiltered beer that contained resveratrol, the chemical in red wine that appears to have a host of beneficial properties. They think they’ve actually done it, based on some tests conducted in the last few days before flying up to Boston, but the project is ongoing. College kids engineering healthier beer: now that’s a reason to celebrate.
Image of the Stata Center edited from Wikimedia Commons. Stay tuned for much more coverage of iGEM 2008 on Thursday and Friday!
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