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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 what we hope to do for many, many years. Right now, we are in the planning stages. We are narrowing in on particular projects and raising funding. If you are potentially interested in sponsoring us, please head over to the Sponsorship page.
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?
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.
