Team:British Columbia

Blasting Away Biofilms

To disperse ''Staphylococcus aureus'' biofilms, our team is working to express an endogenous bacteriophage and biofilm matrix-degrading enzyme DspB under the control of the Agr quorum-sensing system.

And The Award Goes To...

Here's a list of the things we've accomplished.

It's Human!

Stop by our human practices section and play games, talk on the forum etc.

The Team

This year 13 students started the Heidelberg iGEM team.

Heidelberg Jamboree Blog

We will report all important news during the jamboree right away from Cambridge here.

The iGEM idea

iGEM (international genetically engineered machines competition) is an international competition in synthetic biology, hosted by the MIT in Boston. The aim of this competition is to answer a basic question that Randy Rettberg, the director of iGEM, once described as follows: "Can simple biological systems be built from standard, interchangeable parts and operated in living cells? Or is biology just too complicated to be engineered in this way?" The iGEM-approach to answer that question is to actually try to engineer biological systems with a proper function. To this end, more than 100 interdisciplinary student teams from all over the world, mainly consisting of undergraduate students in biology, biochemistry, engineering, informatics and mathematics, carry out different projects during the Summer. These projects reach from medical applications, i.e. genetically modified bacteria used in cancer-treatment to environmental and manufacturing projects, i.e. the construction of a watch-like counter consisting of living cells. In contrast to classical genetic engineering where only one gene is transferred from organism A to organism B, synthetic biology goes forward into the construction of whole new systems with a completely new function. Therefore, all iGEM-Teams get access to a gene- Database called registry, where hundreds of different genetic parts with characterized functions are available in a “plug-and-play” –like format. These parts can be simply stuck together to build functional systems. The rising number of iGEM-Teams over the last years as well as the upcoming public interest in iGEM, the iGEM-Teams’ projects and synthetic biology in general shows, that synthetic biology will for sure have a great impact in many different fields of both scientific research and every-day life.

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