Illinois team earns international award in synthetic biology contest

An interdisciplinary team of students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has won a top award in an international synthetic biology competition. The Illinois group is the only undergraduate team from the United States to bring home one of the eight track awards from the 2013 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) "world jamboree" contest.

The Illinois students won the Best Health and Medicine Project track award in the undergraduate division for their project, "Cardiobiotics, a Genetically Engineered Approach to Cardiovascular Health," which is focused on developing a biological solution to combat the effects of plaque that leads to heart disease.

More than 80 teams from around the world competed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Nov. 2-4, 2013, and more than 200 teams qualified for the event by earning awards in regional contests. The Illinois team qualified by earning a gold medal in the North America regional jamboree in Toronto in October.

Illinois' multidisciplinary team includes students from the colleges of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, Engineering, and Liberal Arts and Sciences: Blake Wilhelmsen (bioengineering, Morris, IL), Xinyi (Cathy) Guo (molecular and cellular biology, Beijing, China), Rachel Walker (bioengineering, Decatur, IL), Ashley S. Moy (bioengineering, Barrington, IL), Adi Malik (bioengineering, Hinsdale, IL), Margaret Barbero (bioengineering, Morgantown, WV), Arnav Rana (molecular and cellular biology, Westmont, IL), and Will Dolatowski (agricultural and biological engineering, Wheaton, IL).

iGEM’s aim is to encourage high school and college students to use biological “parts” from an open community and contribute safely to furthering the field of synthetic biology. According to the iGEM Foundation, students “use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells” under the guidance of iGEM and faculty advisors.

The iGEM Foundation presented "world championship awards" in eight categories in both Undergraduate and Overgraduate divisions. Awards also were presented for Best Entrepreneurship Project, Best Software Project, Best Presentation, Best Poster, Best Wiki, two overall runners-up and an overall winner.

On Nov. 8, National Public Radio featured the iGEM world jamboree in a half-hour segment of "Science Friday," NPR's weekly call-in radio program on science and technology. In the episode on biosecurity, Peter Carr, director of iGEM judging, noted some of the innovations presented during the international competition, including a description of the Illinois project.