 |  | |
|
Students build competing genetic machines
| | | By: Hilary Parker, Staff Writer | 07/07/2006 |
| | |
Princeton University team participating in International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition.
There's something of a factory in the basement of
Lewis Thomas Laboratory on the Princeton University campus, where 11
students are currently spending hours each day creating complex
circuits and putting bricks together.
But because Lewis Thomas Laboratory is one of the
molecular biology research facilities at Princeton, the circuits are
genetic and the bricks — "Biobricks" — are building blocks that
synthetic biologists may one day stack together to engineer
programmable stem cells.
The students, under the
direction of Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Ron Weiss
and Professor of Molecular Biology Ihor Lemischka, make up the
Princeton team participating in the third annual International
Genetically Engineered Machines Competition, organized by the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology iCampus program, funded by
Microsoft Corp. The "friendly competition," as Professor Weiss
describes it, has grown from a match among six colleges and
universities in 2004 to 13 in 2005, and tripled in size this year with
39 participating teams.
The Princeton team
consists mainly of Princeton undergraduates with a few participants
from the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of
Materials' Research Experience for Undergraduates, as well as two high
school students who participate in lectures and discussions but are not
allowed to conduct laboratory research. For the duration of their 10
weeks at the university, the team members work with Professors Weiss
and Lemischka and a team of graduate student instructors headed by
Priscilla Purnick, a research associate in the electrical engineering
department.
Currently sponsored by a number of
entities at the university — including the departments of molecular
biology and electrical engineering, the Provost's Office, PRISM, the
PRISM REU program and the Center for Innovation in Engineering
Education — additional funding from the National Science Foundation is
also pending.
"I think it's critical for biology
to embrace a lot of the engineering practices," said Professor Weiss.
While biology has become increasingly quantitative — or numbers-based —
over the years, he said, synthetic biology goes beyond that in the way
in which engineering principles are used to manipulate and create
biological materials that can be "wired" to perform certain functions.
The Princeton iGEM 2006 team's research on mouse
embryonic stem cells is in keeping with an ongoing collaboration
between the laboratories of Professors Weiss and Lemischka, Professor
Weiss said, and the university's "stem-cell initiative" to promote and
formalize the stem-cell research taking place in a variety of
departments.
After three weeks, the Princeton
iGEM participants — many without extensive prior training in biological
principles and laboratory techniques — have attended lectures to
increase their baseline knowledge and learn research protocols. With
that learning in place, they are now beginning to generate ideas for
new Biobricks they want to create, Professor Weiss said, and will soon
face the task of creating cells that actually work.
"The real challenge is understanding what it takes to
program these cells," he said. The iGEM participants will be able to
assay their creations based on a variety of factors, he said, such as
whether the cells express fluorescent proteins or communicate with
neighboring cells to "tell" them to differentiate into muscle or nerve
cells.
The research has an ultimate goal of
giving "more capabilities to stem cells," Professor Weiss said, that
may one day be used to repair severed spinal cords or treat Alzheimer's
and Parkinson's diseases.
The iGEM 2006 competition will conclude Nov. 4 to 6 with a Jamboree at MIT.
| |
©PACKETONLINE News Classifieds Entertainment Business - Princeton and Central New Jersey 2006
| | |
|
| | |
|
Business 
