MIT 2006

From 2006.igem.org

See our wiki at MIT iGEM 2006 at OpenWetWare. (Far more information available there!)

Members

The MIT iGEM team consists of 5 students working fulltime during summer 2006 on engineering a biological system. In addition, we have 5 graduate student advisors and 2 faculty advisors.

From left to right: Austin Che, Kate Broadbent, Samantha Sutton, Jason Kelly, Veena Venkatachalam, Boyuan Zhu, Barry Canton, Andre Green, Stephen Payne, Reshma Shetty. Not shown: Drew Endy and Tom Knight. Photo courtesy of Professor Daisuke Umeno, Chiba University.

Students

• Kate Broadbent
• Andre Green
• Stephen Payne
• Veena Venkatachalam
• Boyuan Zhu

Email us: team AT igem.mit.edu

Advisors

• Barry Canton
• Austin Che
• Drew Endy
• Jason Kelly
• Tom Knight
• Reshma Shetty
• Samantha Sutton

Email us: igem AT igem.mit.edu

Project overview

This summer, MIT's iGEM 2006 team is developing bacteria that smell pleasant. We have inserted several genes into bacterial genomes to make the cells produce a wintergreen and/or a banana scent. Scents can act as natural biological tags and have many extended applications. By attaching the scent tag to a case-sensitive promoter, we engineered a cellular system to report on environmental conditions. Also, since E. coli naturally produce a fecal smelling compound, we feel that our system will be useful to scientists worldwide as it will make lab work with E. coli bacteria a little less painful. Other bacteria are responsible for producing human odor problems in the mouth, armpits, and feet. By implementing our system in these foul smelling bacteria, we could potentially develop bacterial deoderant. In addition, we could implement our system in yeast, thereby producing new flavors and scents in bread and beer. Perfuming bacterial biofilters are yet another feasible industrial application of our project.

Team photos

Photo courtesy of Professor Daisuke Umeno, Chiba University.

Image courtesy of Professor Daisuke Umeno, Chiba University.