Last call for applications

Are you a second year student at Cambridge? Would you like to participate in the international Genetically Engineered Machines competition in Synthetic Biology over the summer of 2011?

The University of Cambridge supports a student team in the annual iGEM competition in Synthetic Biology. We are assembling a team to apply for Wellcome Trust iGEM summer studentships over the summer of 2011.

iGEM is an international competition where student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the MIT Registry of Standard Biological Parts. In Cambridge. we start with a two-week crash course in Synthetic Biology, with an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty. The iGEM students then face the challenge of designing a new biological system and constructing this over the summer, using standard parts and DNA synthesis to establish the system in living cells. The project culminates with an international meeting at MIT in November. 

iGEM has grown as a summer competition, with 5 teams in 2004, 13 teams in 2005 - the first year that the competition grew internationally, 32 teams in 2006, 54 teams in 2007, 84 teams in 2008, 112 teams in 2009 and 130 teams in 2010. Projects have ranged from banana and wintergreen smelling bacteria, to an arsenic biosensor, to Bactoblood, and buoyant bacteria. Cambridge teams were finalists last year, with better engineered bioluminesence, and won the Grand Prize in 2009 with a scheme for sensitive biosensors that produced an array of colour biopigments (More information can be found on this site: http://www.synbio.org.uk/igem.html)

These are student driven projects, and the iGEM competition provides a opportunity to engage in original research as a team - with control over scientific direction and budget. It is fun and challenging.

The Wellcome Trust is offering a number of student stipends to support the participation of a limited number of UK teams in the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM). The stipend will provide promising undergraduates with hands-on experience of synthetic biology during their 2011 summer vacation, with the aim of encouraging young scientists to consider a career in interdisciplinary research. The Cambridge iGEM teams have always been highly interdisciplinary, and we actively recruit students who may have little experience with biological systems, but who have complementary skills in engineering, computing or physical sciences.

Bursaries are available for a maximum of ten students per team and for up to ten weeks during the summer vacation. Each bursary provides a stipend of £180 per week. There may be only one application per team for a maximum of ten stipends. Application forms must be completed by a team adviser or sponsor. Each student must be at a university within the UK or the Republic of Ireland (RoI) and should be an undergraduate registered for a basic science, engineering, mathematical, physical science, social and ethical science, dentistry, medical or veterinary degree. Each student should be in the middle year/s of a first degree of study (i.e. not in their first or last year) or a medical student between the end of the second year and the end of the penultimate year. More information about the Wellcome Trust scheme can be found at: www.wellcome.ac.uk/igem.

If you are interested in applying for a Wellcome iGEM2011 studentship at the University of Cambridge, forward your details including, (i) a short description of why you would like to participate and how you might contribute, (ii) a CV, to Jim Haseloff at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by January 7th, 2011. This is the last call! 

See the video of the Cambridge team's presentation at the iGEM2010 Jamboree. The video is hosted at the iGEM HQ site at http://2010.igem.org/files/video/Cambridge.mp4.
The Cambridge team consisted of Bill Collins, Hannah Copley, Peter Emmrich, Will Handley, Anja Hohmann, Emily Knott, Paul Masset, Ben Reeve and Theo Sanderson. They were finalists in the competition, and received a Gold Medal and shared prizes for Best Wiki, and iGEMers award. Click here to play

The iGEM2010 Jamboree is here again, running Nov 6th-8th. The Cambridge team presented the E.glowli story, showing a set of BioBricks to allow generation of bioluminescence in a wide range of colours which have applications both as reporters for biosensors and as natural light sources. 

A number of strategies were used to extend the use of firefly luciferase: (i) codon optimisation for increased light output, (ii) use of a luciferin regenerating enzyme, and (iii) mutagenesis to create a number of different colours.

Light producing systems from Vibrio fischeri were also explored. The team created the first BioBrick to emit light in normal E. coli strains without the addition of any external substrate.

The team made extensive use of Gibson Assembly to manufacture these parts, and have submitted an RFC to the BioBricks Foundation to help promote use of this technique.

In addition, new software tools were built. (i) Gibthon Construct Designer allows the user to enter a series of BioBrick or GenBank IDs in a specific order and computes the appropriate primers for Gibson Assembly. (ii) BioBrick → GenBank allows parts from the registry to be downloaded in .gb format, making them compatible with a wide range of biological software. (iii) The Ligation Calculator is a small calculator to help you work out the proportions to use for ligation in BioBrick assembly without having to worry about units.

Finally, the E.glometer is a cheap, easily built, piece of electronics for measuring bioluminescence. It allows scientists without access to expensive plate readers to measure bacterial light output and has potential applications in quantitative biosensors.

University of Cambridge iGEM2010 team's video description of Dan Gibson's DNA assembly protocol - and tribute to its use in Synthetic Biology.

25 students participated in this year's Summer crash course in Synthetic Biology at the University of Cambridge. The course included lectures and hands-on laboratory sessions covering modern microbiology and molecular genetics techniques, software modelling, literature review, presentation and project-based challenges. The students were drawn from across Biology, Engineering and the Physical Sciences in Cambridge, with visitors from Harvard, KAUST and the Royal College of Arts in London.

Lectures
Introduction to Synthetic Biology (Jim Ajioka), Bacterial gene expression (Jim Haseloff), Molecular Biology techniques (Jim Ajioka), Reporter genes (Jim Haseloff), Experimental Design (Gos Micklem), Sequencing and Synthesis (Gos Micklem), Microbial Diversity (Keith Johnstone), Open Source technologies (Jim Haseloff), Synthetic Parts, Genes & Circuits (Jim Ajioka and Jim Haseloff), Stochasticity: Noise in Biological Systems (Lorenz Wernisch), Biological Modelling & SBML (Nicolas Le Novere), Modelling for Synthetic Biology (Andrew Phillips), Quorum Sensing (Rita Monson), Synthetic Logic (Gos Micklem), Standards in Synthetic Biology (Dean Madden, National Centre for Biotechnology Education), Microbial Biosensors (Jim Ajioka), Appropriate Technology and Development (David Grimshaw, Practical Action), Anhydrobiosis (AlanTunnacliffe), Chemotaxis (Dennis Bray), Microfluidics and microdroplets (Wolfgang Bauer).

 NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE PREVIEW

iGEM2009 and Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering

The Cambridge team was awarded the Grand Prize at the iGEM2009 Synthetic Biology competition finals at MIT (http://2009.igem.org). This was against stiff competition from over 100 teams in top international institutions. The students (Vivian Mullin, Alan Walbridge, Shuna Gould, Siming Ma, Mike Davies, Megan Stanley and Crispian Wilson), provided a superb description of their work engineering DNA devices for transcriptional tuning and pigment production in environmental biosensors. As well as winning the overall prize for best project, the Cambridge team was awarded a gold medal, and trophy for the best project in the Environment Track.

News articles:
CUED: The Cambridge 2009 iGEM team awarded the Grand Prize
Wired UK: Building new life forms at the iGEM Jamboree
Discovery Channel: Bright bacteria wins synthetic biology competition
National Public Radio: Students build living microbial machines
Biotechniques: University of Cambridge team wins iGEM synthetic biology competition
Technology Review: A genetically engineered rainbow of bacteria
Molecularist: Report on iGEM09, from a newbie
University of Cambridge press release: Cambridge team wins Grand Prize for iGEM2009

The Cambridge iGEM 2009 team presented their E. chromi project at the iGEM Jamboree at MIT. They described new BioBricks for the production of pigments in bacteria, and sensitivity tuners for the construction of new enviromental biosensors. (1st November 2009) See a full video of the presentation at http://2009.igem.org/files/video/Cambridge.m4v - including the surprise Happy Birthday song for Mike at the end of the presentation!

See photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/haseloff/collections/72157615302666424/