Penn State Team a Gold Medal Winner at iGEM Competition

13 December 2007 — A Penn State student team won a gold medal at the 2007 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, an annual contest hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The competition provides students the opportunity to design and build genetic machines using a library of standard DNA parts. This year's iGEM competition included 56 teams from 16 countries.

The competition challenges students to develop biological systems through standard, interchangeable parts referred to as "BioBricks," which are provided by the Registry of Standard Biological Parts -- a core resource of the iGEM program. The genetically engineered systems must be run in living cells. Through the research process, students are educated about biological engineering and how to apply the new tools of molecular biology to design novel devices and systems for a variety of applications.

The Penn State team devised two projects for the competition. For the first project, the team is modifying the metabolism of bacteria to increase digestion and conversion rates of biomass. Using microorganisms to convert biomass to fuel, such as ethanol, offers a promising alternative to traditional energy sources, but microbes such as Escherichia coli have evolved to preferentially metabolize sugars in a sequential process known as diauxie. The team designed a system that allows bacteria to metabolize both xylose and glucose simultaneously, the most common lignocellulosic sugars found in plants, by reducing diauxie.

For the second project, the team designed a bio-dosimeter, a biological system that acts as dosimeter -- a device that measures ionizing radiation. The team utilized the lambda bacteriophage as a radiation biosensor -- it switches DNA pathways in response to stress in the host cell. The biosensor monitors the genetic damage accumulated by a bacterial cell and emits a signal after a critical threshold is reached.

The Penn State iGEM team is comprised of five undergraduate students and one State College Area High School student: Samhita Banavar, junior, State High; Noah Johnson, sophomore, bioengineering; George Khoury, senior, chemical engineering; Galen Lynch, sophomore, biology and mathematics; Garrett Tobin, junior, chemical engineering; and Lucien Weiss, junior, chemistry and mathematics.

Team advisers are Patrick Cirino, assistant professor of chemical engineering; Megan Marshall, agricultural and biological engineering post doctoral scholar; Tom Richard, associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering; Paul Weiss, distinguished professor of chemistry and physics; Ming Tien, professor of biochemistry; Darryl Farber, assistant professor in the Science, Technology and Society Program; and William Hancock, associate professor of bioengineering.

Dupont and Invitrogen provided student support for the project, as did the Penn State Center for Nanoscale Science (MRSEC).