BU06:Executive Summary

From 2006.igem.org

PUNCHY!

• SB is a new field - Why is it interesting, no, essential!?
  • Standardization of genetic engineering to enable innovation
  • Improves collaboration, rate of innovation,
  • 'programmable' cells
  • when we do genetic engineering it should be like building a bridge--we can show that what we build will work; it's not a wild-ass guess whether or not it will work
  • specialization -- let people focus on their chosen area of expertise with the assumption that all the other levels of abstraction will just work

• • iGEM is about undergrads

Motivation factors for BU professors:

• put boston university undergraduates at the center of an infrastructure of a 'revolutionary' (sorry) new field
• opportunity to build a year-on-year franchise (a resource for getting kids molecular biology experience -- keep in mind there's not that many _mol bio_ labs in the dept)
• let our undergrads socialize scientifically outside the university
• complement/enhance senior project (one of our key differentiators--sorry to lapse into admin-speak)
• bringing an engineering sensibility to biology is a huge deal for a biomedical engineering department centrally located in a city with a huge biomedical industrial complex

• Jay Keasling/Amyris greatly reduced the cose of producing artemesin for huge # of people in need -- as the good Dr. Endy says we should make this routine so that it doesn't require $20m of Bill Gates' money and 100 (?) man-years of effort.

• quantitative quantitative quantitative (BU BME professors' three favorite words)
• growth in # of teams (5, one of which was BU) -> 12 -> 43 -> at least seven hundred next year
• obvious opportunity for press coverage

• biofactories
• we have people doing tissue engineering; wouldn't they like to have predictable cells?
• the Biological Century

We need one million dollars!

We are a group of Undergraduate students from BU who participated in a molecular biology course during the Spring 2006 semester. Our professor, Timothy Gardner, and Professor Drew Endy (MIT) introduced us to the world of synthetic biology. Synthetic Biology is a new field of research that integrates science and engineering in order design biological systems that carry out specific functions, such as programming bacteria to work as a biological toggle switch. Fascinated by the opportunities given by this novel we field of research we decided to participate in the iGEM 2006 competition. Because of the complexity involved in designing and building biological systems we decided to attempt to implement three ideas, each more complicated than the previous one. Moreover, the more complicated ideas are built off of the simpler ideas