Team:Heidelberg

Project Abstract

Early efforts in synthetic biology have focused on using prokaryotes as an engineering chassis, whereas novel developments indicate a shift towards an eukaryotic synthetic biology. The value of eukaryotic synthetic biology is manifold: in medical research, it will accomplish new ways of gene therapy; in plant biotechnology, it can contribute to the struggle for a sustainable food and energy solution. Finally, the ability to assemble and analyze complicated biological systems step by step will allow a revolutionary approach to fundamental research.

Establishing new standards for iGEM, the Heidelberg 2009 team will be concerned with developing ways for measuring promoters in mammalian cells, a default chassis and a first evaluation of the recently postulated BioBrick beta proposal 2 (Tom Knight).

Considering the importance of controlling gene expression, our team's work will focus on natural and synthetic mammalian promoters. Our vision is to provide the synthetic biology community with a methodical library of such promoters (with different output strength and sensitivity to different regulatory proteins) and a model which can provide guidance for the development of further synthetic promoters. Our efforts will therefore, from the very beginning, equally entail bioinformatics and wet lab work.

As an early application for such a promoter library, our team will attempt to develop an assay which can monitor the activity of several pathways in one cell. Such an assay is of high value for biological research as it can be applied for studying stem cell differentiation, tumor formation, apoptosis and autophagy as well as drug response. Our team will apply the assay towards testing several anti-cancer drugs. A computer-based model will lay the foundations for future work. It will help us to build a logic that integrates the promoter activities and will allow us to predict the possibilities of a single functional output.

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, 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. Therefore 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 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.

Our Team

This year 13 students are part of the Heidelberg iGEM Team.

Language of the Main Page