Going for gold – Imperial students impress judges at genetic engineering competition

Biochemists and Bioengineers team up to win gold medal for infection-detecting device<em> - News</em>

By Danielle Reeves
Tuesday 13 November 2007

Ten Imperial undergraduates have brought home a gold award for their entry in a prestigious international competition to create genetically engineered machines last week.

The Imperial team, comprising students from Bioengineering and Biochemistry, together with four advisors and two professors, travelled to leading US university MIT to present their project to a team of international judges at the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition. For 10 weeks over the summer holidays the student team had worked to produce their device: a liquid that can be applied to the outside of urinary catheters which fluoresces green when it detects the presence of a potentially harmful infection.

Two of the team members, third year Biochemist James Chappell and third year Bioengineer Dirk van Swaay, explained how one of the biggest challenges of the project was quickly picking up each other's skills: "The iGEM competition is all about synthetic biology, a new type of science which applies engineering principles and methods to biological problems. As a biochemist it was a steep learning curve for me to get my head around the engineering elements of the project," said James.

The first four or five weeks of the project were spent getting up to speed on each other's disciplines, and researching ideas for a device. The students and their academic advisors settled on the idea of the 'Infector Detector', a device which uses the principles of synthetic biology in a hospital-friendly way.

Dirk explains: "Normally synthetic biology involves manipulating bacterial DNA to behave in a desired way. However, you can’t really have a hospital product based in e-coli bacteria. So instead we used a liquid solution as the vehicle for the DNA 'instructions' we’d customised from inside a bacterial cell, which includes a protein to seek out an latch onto a small molecule called AHL, found in the infections that develop on catheters. When the protein latches onto an AHL molecule, a second protein is produced which glows green, which will alert medical staff to the presence of an early-stage infection."

The student team received their gold medal for a panel presentation and question-and-answer session during which they showed that their device works in the lab and has the potential to be developed for clinical use. The professors supervising the project, Richard Kitney and Paul Freemont, hope to get the team's results published in a peer-reviewed journal, and to work with the students to refine their device with a view to producing a market-ready product.

Summing up his experience on the iGEM project team, James said: "This has given me a greater insight than I would normally have had as an undergraduate into what life's like as an academic researcher. It has definitely helped confirm that I want to follow a career in research when I finish my degree – it was a unique experience, getting the chance to devise and carry-through a brand new idea in such an exciting field and I learned lots of invaluable new skills."

Dirk added: "It was interesting to see the work that all the other teams had done, and the visit to MIT with the rest of our group was a great experience over all. I am particularly interested in a career in applying scientific discoveries to create new, real-life technologies, so this competition has been invaluable practice for me."

Professor Richard Kitney congratulated the team, saying: "I'm delighted with how far our team got in taking an idea from the conception stage right through to proving that it works in the lab. The whole team worked really hard and should be very proud of their achievements."

Professor Paul Freemont added: "Synthetic biology is a new field which promises to have an impact on many everyday areas of our lives in the future. I'm really pleased that Imperial's students applied these new scientific principals to devise such a practical and much-needed device to prevent serious hospital infections."

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