Turns out it wasn’t flash that won the day, but substance.
And the winner was a small, interdisciplinary team of science students from the College of William and Mary vying against bigger, better-resourced teams from around the globe — including such U.S. heavy-hitters as MIT and Yale.
Eight students from Williamsburg took the grand prize in the undergraduate division of the iGEM 2015 Giant Jamboree held last month in Boston.
“To be clear about the magnitude of what they have achieved,” judge Markus Gershater said in an email, “they came top of 259 teams of some of the most dynamic and hard-working students in the world.”
Gershater is chief scientific officer at Synthace Ltd., a bioengineering firm based in London.
The team’s “elegant work,” he said, “could be a small but fundamental piece of how future synthetic biology is carried out.”
Essentially what the students did was quantify the “noise” or variability in the messages passed along from one component of a cell to another. Those biomolecular messages can get garbled in transmission, much like a garbled phone message.
A better understanding of biological parts and their variability better enables bioengineers to reprogram biological systems to perform what Gershater calls “useful, world-changing functions.”
The iGEM competition, for International Genetically Engineered Machine, began at MIT 12 years ago as a way to foster innovation in the field, but this is only the second year William and Mary has competed.
Projects are intended to be entirely student-driven, under the watchful eye of team mentors. High school, undergraduate and graduate students compete in separate divisions and are tasked to come up with their own ideas, then, using a starter kit of biological components, build a unique bioengineering project, much like building with Legos.
Some teams tackled sexier topics, such as a biological circuit that could detect cancer or having DNA and RNA perform new functions, said William and Mary team co-leader Andrew Halleran, 21.
“We weren’t really trying to build a flashy circuit of our own,” Halleran said. “What we were trying to do was contribute knowledge that can be used by every team and every synthetic biologist going forward to build more intelligent network design.”
Their team consisted of students in biology, computer science, mathematics, chemistry and neuroscience. They chose their idea in the spring and worked on it through the summer.
Team mentor and biology professor Margaret Saha said judges seemed particularly impressed by the team’s breadth as well as depth of knowledge, both in theory and practice.
“This was an enormous deal,” Saha said of their victory. “We really focus on our undergraduates here and getting them into research, but we simply felt we couldn’t compete with some of these larger schools in terms of the support that their students were given. Our students were just so hard-working, so creative, so brilliant that they came home with the prize.”
This is the first time a U.S. team has even made the finals since 2010, said Halleran. The team also won honors for best measurement project, best education and public engagement and best presentation.
Team members included Halleran, co-leader Caroline Golino, John Marken, Elli Cryan, Taylor Jacobs, Michael LeFew, Joe Maniaci and Panya Vij.
To learn more about the team project, go to http://2015.igem.org/Team:William_and_Mary
Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.
