International Genetically Engineered Machines Team at UIUC

Vital Stats

Meagan M

Urbana, IL

  • people helped40
  • People Doing It22

The Problem

The International Genetically Engineered Machines Team at Illinois mission is two fold. iGEM creates an ideal opportunity for undergraduate involvement in applied synthetic biology research. Rarely do students have the chance to carry out an entirely self-directed project. Inevitably, students take away many skills, particularly group-work, leadership, analytical thinking, and scientific knowledge, from a year on the iGEM team. In addition to the many personal benefits of participating in the UIUC-Illinois iGEM team, each summer the team chooses a specific research project. The overall goal of projects includes the development of a direct humanitarian application, such as water impurity and toxin detection in developing countries. This summer, the Bioware group of iGEM has focused on the problem of heavy metal toxicity within many water sources. The pollution of our rivers and lakes with heavy metals is a serious problem, and with the booming economies in the Far East it will become an even greater problem in future. Not only will it affect our environment, it also endangers the amount of drinking water that we have. Currently there are no efficient or economic methods to handle this problem. Since deciding on this project, the Bioware group has designed a system that will allow Escherichia coli to collect and sequester arsenic and gold heavy metals within a solution. We are currently initiating the lab work that will literally bring this system to life. The other group of the UIUC-Illinois iGEM team is the Software Tools team. The Software Tools group is work on the development of BioMortar software which will allow scientists to input a specific start and end compound as well as parameters for the reaction and output corresponding metabolic pathways and necessary plasmids to physically construct the system. Recently, Jay Keasling used this form of metabolic synthetic biology to produce Artimesinin, an otherwise very expensive drug for malaria, cheaply from bacteria. By creating this system the Software Tools group provides the first step to enabling many synthetic biologists to easily develop and create novel pathways in microorganisms for essential drugs and chemicals.

Plan of Action

After spending months during this past semester recruiting and training a new iGEM team, we have had several productive weeks to truly define our projects. The Bioware group currently has a list of genes we want to work with and primers that will allow us to clone those genes from the E. coli chromosome. Our next few days will be devoted to planning out the lab procedures we will use to develop, troubleshoot, and refine our project. We hope to complete these procedures within the next month so that the remainder of our summer will be spent analyzing, modeling, and further characterizing the system. The Software Tools group has also defined all the features they hope to include in their software and learned the basics of python and java coding. Within the next several months they will complete all the basics and spend the following several weeks working out any quirks and preparing a presentation. Presenting our projects at the annual iGEM Jamboree will be the culmination of our extensive work. I also plan to thoroughly document all contacts, timelines, and sources of funding in order to ensure that our organization is well enough supported and established that for many years to come undergraduates can take away the same knowledge and experience that I have gained and also so that we can continue developing and carrying out similar, humanitarian projects.
Go
Education
Environment

Related Stuff