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Team:UNC Chapel Hill
From 2009.igem.org
Introduction
Welcome to the [http://www.unc.edu University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] 2009 iGem website. This is the inaugural year for us in the iGem competition. We are composed of a group of passionate, industrious students. And we hope to lay the foundation for a UNC iGem team for many years to come. If you are interested in learning more about our project page, please head over to the Project page. If you are potentially interested in sponsoring us, please head over to the Sponsorship page. Thanks!
What is iGem?
We’ve all played with Legos before, fitting them together one by one to build planes, trains, and skyscrapers. The same basic idea facilitated the inspiration for iGem: Can biological systems be built from standardized, interchangable parts—called BioBricks—and operated in living cells? The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition, a premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition, is staged at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to get students involved in this research. Teams are given a kit of biological parts from which they design, build, and test biological systems and operate them in living cells. They are free to create anything their imagination fancies, from wintergreen smelling bacteria to bacterial night-lights. At the annual competition, teams gather from around the world to present their findings. The key idea though, is to further the field of synthetic biology, to promote the development of tools for engineering biology, and to immerse students in an opportunity to perform cutting edge research as part of an emerging scientific community.
- iGem 2009 Website
- [http://partsregistry.org/Main_Page BioBricks Parts Registry]
- [http://biobricks.org/ The BioBricks Foundation]
What is Synthetic Biology?
There are two aspects to Synthetic Biology. First, is the creation of biological components and systems that do not exist in the real world. Imagine a tomato that grows in the shape of a cube, an organism that produces biofuels, or a bacterium that stops the growth of a tumor. These creations may hold the key to ending our world’s most troubling crises, and these creations are exactly what synthetic biologists are striving to generate. In the emerging field of synthetic biology, scientists both design new biological functions and systems, and also better existing ones. Novel DNA sequences are built from scratch, or current DNA sequences are reconstructed, and are incorporated into living cells in the hopes that the cell will acquire the traits of a natural, biological task. After years of genomic research and with the vast development of modern technology, the ways that synthetic biology can benefit humankind are endless.
The second aspect of Synthetic Biology deals with the "re-design and fabrication of existing biological systems". The industrial revolution reached a new level when standards started becoming applied to the manufacturing process. Instead of having custom parts such as screws, why not standardize everything to the same threading and size? Similarly, with Synthetic Biology, we can apply standardization to making new biological systems. We can have standardized genetic parts such as promoters, binding sites, and terminators. Doing so allows us to work with a variety of parts within the same system, providing a level of abstraction and reduction of complexity. Novel, complex biological systems are possible as indicated by previous years of iGem.
Synthetic biology is a rapidly growing field that has as a plethora of potential. The iGem competition ensures that new generations not only become exposed to Synthetic Biology but also participate in it and develop it.
- Synthetic Biology Videos (see the bottom)
- [http://syntheticbiology.org/FAQ.html Synthetic Biology FAQ]
