EU-sponsored teams scoop top prizes at iGEM jamboree
A team of eight undergraduate students from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia has picked up first prize at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Slovenian team took home the engraved award, shaped like a large aluminium Lego block, for a technique using engineered cells that they developed to stabilise the body's response to infection when it becomes too excessive. Such a technique could prevent fatal conditions such as sepsis, an illness caused by overwhelming infection of the bloodstream by toxin-producing bacteria. The team is just one of six European teams to participate in this year's competition, all of which were sponsored by SYNBIOCOMM, an initiative funded under the 'New and Emerging Science and Technology' (NEST) section of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). Established in 2003, the iGEM competition challenges the traditional opinion that biology is a scientific field which is too complicated to be engineered. It brings together teams of students and asks them to build simple biological systems using standard, interchangeable parts, just like a builder uses a set of standard tools to build a house. Over the summer holidays, a total of 380 students from 35 university teams from around the world got to work on their projects using a toolkit of some 500 'BioBricks' - snippets of DNA that have been proven to accomplish certain tasks. The results were impressive, particularly those of the Slovenian team. The winning team was one of only a few to work with mammalian cells, which are more complicated in structure than bacteria or virus cells. Since the toolkit available to them did not contain DNA snippets of these types of cells, the team had to build all their BioBricks from scratch. Other European teams participating at the iGEM jamboree included a group of students from the University of Edinburg, UK, which received the best device award for its method to detect very low concentrations of arsenic in well water using modified E. coli bacteria. This is a cheap and easy-to-use method which could be particularly helpful to poor countries, where arsenic contaminates many drinking wells, causing skin lesions and cancer. Awards also went to students from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, and University of Valencia.