Stony Brook University’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team brought home the gold medal from the iGEM Giant Jamboree for the third time this year. The competition was held in Paris, France from Oct. 23 to Oct. 26 and is a world exposition for synthetic biology.
Stony Brook’s project focused on developing a less invasive, more cost-effective way to diagnose B-cell lymphoma, which is a part of the leukemia and myeloma family of blood cancers.
The team was co-advised by Professor J. Peter Gergen and Associate Professor Kathryn Gunn in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, as well as Professor Gabor Balazsi in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. However, it’s a fully student-driven project that is worked on all summer.
“This is our eleventh year, but the iGEM team began in 2014 when a student came up to me and said a lot of good schools are doing iGEM, and Stony Brook should be doing it,” Gergen said. “It’s ridiculously fun to work with these students. The outcome in terms of student development for the students is phenomenal.”
The team’s aim is to equip E. coli with a genetically engineered gene circuit to develop a less expensive detection method for clinical use. With their engineered E. coli in a microfluidic assay, only a small blood sample will be needed.
“Their mission is to propose and start a project that involves using synthetic biology to address a problem they see in the world,” Gunn said. “The team specifically wanted to create a sensor inside bacteria that would detect a microRNA that is correlated with B-cell lymphoma. The long-term goal would be to improve human health by creating an early warning system that could detect signs of B-cell lymphoma before traditional methods would discover it.”
This year’s competition featured 438 teams from 45+ countries, competing for medals and awards by designing, building and testing projects using cutting-edge synthetic biology. An international panel of over 400+ judges cast their votes to select the winning teams with 209 teams earning gold medals, 138 teams earning silver and 26 teams earning bronze.
This year’s iGEM team comprised three juniors, four sophomores and eight freshmen. It encompassed those with majors in biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, information systems and political science.
“It was great working with iGEM this year. It was my first year as an advisor to the team, and I loved hearing their project ideas and following their progress and providing advice over the summer,” Gunn said. “My lab works on molecular biology, which shares similar techniques with synthetic biology, which is the basis of the iGEM competition, so I was able to share some of my resources with the team, so they could perform the right experiments to answer their questions.”
The University was one of 16 collegiate teams from the United States to earn a gold medal.
“Working with these students is one of the most rewarding experiences I have as director of undergraduate Biology,” Gergen said.
