The BioClock - Bacteria to mark time for Melbourne University team
12 Jun 08
A team of innovative Melbourne University students have joined forces to design what they call a BioClock, using bacteria.
Undergraduate students in disciplines ranging from life sciences and engineering to mathematics and statistics along with recent team recruits, a teacher and four high school students from Coburg Senior High School, will work with advisors based at Bio21 Institute to engineer the biological system.
Alex Caputo, a member of this year's iGEM team, says their aim is to "engineer a biological system that produces bacteria which count in response to a stimulus". He suggests this may lead to the ability to "temporally control a specific function or sequence of biological events".
The iGEM (International Genetically Engineering Machine) competition, now in its sixth year and initiated by MIT in Boston, is intended to introduce students to the emerging field of synthetic biology and essentially poses the question - can simple biological systems be built from standard interchangeable parts and operated in living cells?
Using synthetic biology techniques, contestants in this worldwide competition aim to design, model and build novel biological systems using DNA as building blocks.
Assembly of the BioClock is progressing well. Practical and lab work is being conducted at the Bio21 Institute, under the guidance of Biologist/Engineer Dr Sally Gras and Biochemists Professor Paul Gooley and Assoc Professor Heung-Chin Cheng.
So far the team has received financial and in-kind support from the Bio21 Institute, Dept of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Faculty of Engineering and City of Melbourne.
Last year's Melbourne University iGEM entry won a gold award for innovative use of intersecting light beams to cause a suspension of E.coli to aggregate into a predictably shaped mass. The team also shared the best BioBrick award with the University of Cambridge, UK. BioBrick is the term used to describe the competitors' projects that are ultimately submitted to a repository of BioBrick Parts, to be freely accessed by other scientists and future iGEM competitors.
The members of the Melbourne University undergraduate iGEM team are as follows:
Di Wu - Cell Biology
Haozhen Choy - Chemistry (Honours)
Jiaxing Jason Qin - Biomedical Engineering
Shiny Stephen - Biomedical Science
Stephen Pearce - Genetics
Alex Caputo -Chemistry/Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Simon J. Takouridis - Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
David Collins - Biomedical Engineering
Louis A. Downing - Chemical Engineering
If you would like to know more about this year's iGEM team and the BioClock, or would like to support them in some way, contact one of the following members:
Team Contact: Alex Caputo, E: a.caputo@ugrad.unimeb.edu.au
Team Advisor: Alisa Sedghifar, E: a.sedghifar@ugrad.unimelb.edu.au
Assoc. Prof. Heung-Chin Cheng, E: heung@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Sally Gras; E: sgras@unimelb.edu.au
Prof. Paul Gooley; E: prg@unimelb.edu.au
Or visit the team Wiki:
http://openwetware.org/wiki/IGEM:Melbourne/2008
