High school students win Best New Application Award at 2008 IGEM

iGEM is all about synthetic biology, kids. It's the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine competition.

Each team in the IGEM competition has to make something using a kit of biological parts from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Teams of students use these parts to design, build, and operate biological systems in living cells.

IGEM began in 2003 with a course at MIT where students made cells blink. Now, this year had:

  • 1200 participants,
  • 84 teams,
  • and 24 awards.

Amazingly, two of those awards went to a team (UCSF) composed mostly of students from a public high school in San Francisco, Abraham Lincoln High.

I've written about their teacher, George Cachianes, before, and he is inspirational.

What did this team to win the Best New Application award?
They made a system that would silence specific genes in baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. They took a protein that modifies chromatin structure and devised a method to control its activity.

You can read more about the UCSF project here.

And see all the winning teams and participants!

More like this

This story reminds me of those days not so long ago when I was teaching molecular biology to a small group of motivated and talented high school sophomores and juniors. Basically, a group of high school biotechnology seniors from Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, California, were…
I don't know if any DIY biologists are looking for projects, but I think engineering yeast with a gene to detect heavy metals might be a good DIY biology project and I have some ideas for how to do this. What are the advantages of using yeast and working on this kind of problem? This could have…
Congratulations to George Cachianes (who I've written about before), his amazing students from Abraham Lincoln High School, and collaborators at UCSF! These students, from a public high school no less, placed in the top 6 finalists, along with only one other US team. The other top teams were:…
When we think about cooperative behaviour, most of us would think of animals like ants, meerkats, lions or, indeed, humans. But don't rule out yeast. The small, single-celled fungus has provided us with much of our knowledge of genetics and molecular biology and now, it's shedding light on the…