iGEM 2010: Antibiotics for the 21st Century
December 29, 2010by Michal Galdzicki
This year the UW team won the Best Health and Medicine Project of the year prize at the 2010 iGEM Jamboree. The award winning project is titled “Antibiotics for the 21st Century“. New antibiotics such as the two examples developed by this years team, will be critical in medicine for the next century. The spread of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic strains has rendered more and more long standing anti-bacterial therapeutics ineffective. The emergence of these antibiotic resistant bacteria has been largely caused by the unfettered application of broad-spectrum antibiotics in cases when such therapies were unwarranted.
At the same time, throughout the 20th century the use of these antibiotics revolutionized medicine and saved countless lives. The work that the University of Washington undergraduates performed this summer has the potential to impact the lives of millions of people in need of new antibiotics. With this motivation in mind the team from set out on their summer research project and succeeded to not only develop two new antibiotic therapy candidates, but most importantly experienced real research from start to finish.
It is the story of how these young and inexperienced, but wildly motivated students could accomplish such a feat in just a few months, which amazed me. The 2010 iGEM year at UW started with interested students coming to meetings and talks in the Winter quarter of 2010 and by the end of the summer their project evolved into a well defined biological engineering endeavor. The students this year were from several different majors, including Biology, Biochemistry, and Microbiology. Some were college freshmen, having just finished high school at the beginning of the summer, while others had worked in research laboratories before, and one student was a returning member of the gold medal decorated 2009 UW iGEM team. The interesting talks by host faculty, graduate students and invited external experts about a broad range of topics gave students background information and an overview of iGEM. For example: Dr. Rob Carlson, who is a consultant, independent researcher, entrepreneur, and iGEM judge introduced Synthetic Biology and iGEM; Dr. Marina Kalyuzhnaya, faculty from UW Microbiology, inspired the team with a explanation of metabolic engineering of methylotrpohs. Dr. Lee Pang, from the Institute for Systems Biology explained the importance of predictive modeling for bacterial re-engineering. The sponsoring faculty and their PhD students also presented about their research and then the team was ready to brainstorm ideas for this year’s iGEM project. The students were advised by PhD students, Ingrid Swanson, Justin Siegal, Matt Smith, Rob Egbert, and myself. Throughout the whole process the students worked under the guidance and oversight of professors David Baker, Herbert Sauro, Joseph Mougous, and Eric Klavins.
To explore the potential for several of the brainstormed ideas the team was organized by student interest, into sub-groups for the Spring quarter to allow students to takes their ideas and really make them into putative research plans for the summer. These students then worked within the labs of each of the faculty, relying on the expertise in those labs, to form an understanding of the motivations, the strategies, and identify pitfalls they may encounter. Every week the whole team would come together and report on the exciting plans for the summer project. Then as the Spring quarter was wrapping up, several of the intial ideas boiled to the top as exciting and feasible. Once these few best ideas rose to the top the students voted and chose to engage in the research full time for the summer academic break. The students quickly got up to speed on lab protocols, programming, and data analysis, or more emphatically, they hit the ground running. Safely, of course.
The summer brought long days and sometimes nights in the lab. Students learned to design and model proteins, clone genes, plan and assemble genetic constructs, and how to verify everything along the way. PCR reactions don’t always work and code doesn’t compile. The iGEM team learned to celebrate every little success, or sometimes even the confused frustration. But they were able to celebrate enough times to develop Antibiotics for the 21st Century. The research process is grueling no matter what the kit advertisement says and interpreting failures is an incredibly important part of the learning process. The most important goal of the iGEM experience is for the students to have fun and to learn how research is done. When they completed this project the students were proud. They succeeded and published their work on the web for everyone to see.
The project wiki, is a key component of iGEM research presentations as it details all of the scientific material and describes the work done. Putting the wiki together, from design to polished dynamic document was a feat in itself. Such polished and detailed web publication of your research work is something even most post graduate researchers don’t do. It’s extremely important for the institutional memory of the iGEM competition. Each year, new students are able to get ideas and even re-use the DNA parts created by all teams in prior years. Once complete they took their results to the iGEM Jamboree to present to their peers from around the world.
Our undergraduate students presented their project on developing two new antibiotic therapies. They were awarded a goldmedal recognizing their the high quality of their research, documentation (on the wiki), and for contributing tools that will aid future synthetic biology efforts. The 128 teams from around the world were tough competitors, including some ground breaking projects from other universities. But our students stood out, the only other US team to win their science track was MIT. We even received an iGEM trophy for the UW to show off .
Cross your fingers for the 2011 UW iGEM team!