Josef, Jeff, Alex, Chris, Doug/Conan

A whirlwind competition resulted in the wet bench team bringing home the gold and the software team bringing in the silver.

Team Members

  • James Arnold – Biochemistry
  • Josef Dunbar – Biochemistry
  • Karen Hendricksen – Biology/Biochemistry
  • Hugo Kim – Neurobiology/Biology/Biochemistry
  • Kyle Langford – Biochemistry
  • Alex Leone – Electrical Engineering/Computer Science
  • Scott Mason – Biochemistry
  • Alec Nielsen – BioEngineering/Electrical Engineering
  • Jeff Nivala – Biology
  • Hae Soo – Biochemistry
  • Doug White – BioEngineering
  • Jee Hoon Jang – BioEngineering
  • Gabriel See (High School)

Advisors

  • Ingrid Swanson –  Microbiology
  • Rob Egbert – Electrical Engineering
  • Sean Sleight – Bioengineering
  • Deepak Chandran – Bioengineering
  • Justin Siegel – Biomolecular Structure and Design

Collaborators

  • Gustav Jansson – HiTechnic
  • Pavel Khijniak – Microsoft
  • Raik Gruenberg – Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona

Faculty

  • Eric Klavins
  • Herbert Sauro

The Wet Lab Project: The Idealized Protein Purification System: Improving the lives of molecular biologists

Recombinant, purified protein production is a decades-old technology that has revolutionized research in biotechnology and medicine. However, the traditional method of purified protein production is a time-consuming and laborious procedure requiring expensive and specialized equipment. Our project, the Idealized Protein Purification (IPP) system, is an all-in-one protein expression and purification platform built on BioBrick standards that will reduce costs, save time, and simplify procedures associated with recombinant protein production. The key to our IPP system is a novel combination of three subsystems: expression, secretion and display. We use E. coli bacteria that we have genetically modified to be a chassis for expressing your favorite protein, secreting it to the media, then binding and displaying the protein on the cell surface. At this point, collecting your favorite purified protein is as simple as pelleting and re-suspending a sufficient quantity of bacterial cells in an elution buffer. The speed and simplicity of our IPP system exhibits the utility of synthetic biology for developing new techniques that improve upon established practices.

The Software Project: BioBrick-A-Bot: Lego Robot for Automated BioBrick DNA Assembly

Commercial Liquid Handling Systems are extremely expensive, and are typically beyond the reach of the average molecular biologist interested in performing high throughput methods. To address this problem, we design and implement a liquid handling system built from commonly accessible Legos. Our goal is the automation of BioBrick assembly on a platform that can itself be easily replicated and we demonstrate a proof-of-principle for this system by transferring colored dye solutions on a 96-well plate. We introduce a new concept called LegoRoboBrick. The liquid handling system is build from 3 new LegoRoboBrick modular components: ALPHA (Automated Lego Pipette Head Assembly), BETA (BioBrick Environmental Testing Apparatus), and PHI (Pneumatic Handling Interface). We will demonstrate that the same BioBrick assembly software can run on multiple plug-and-play LegoRoboBrick instances with different physical dimensions and geometric configurations. The modular design of LegoRoboBricks allows easy extension of new laboratory functionalities in the future.

Winnings

Gold Medal
Silver Medal