November 05, 2012
A fluorescent biosensor that measures cellular activity, created by a team of Carnegie Mellon University undergraduates, earned the Best Foundational Advance prize at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition's World Championship Jamboree held Nov. 2-5 in Cambridge, Mass.
For this year's competition, more than 190 teams from 34 countries used a tool-kit of standard, interchangeable biological parts to design and build biological systems that do not exist in nature. The teams first presented their work in Regional Jamborees, where 71 teams qualified to participate in the World Championship.
The Best Foundational Advance Prize is awarded to the team that creates a biological system that could help enable the success of other systems created using synthetic biology. The CMU students, Yang Choo (E'14), Eric Pederson (S'15), Jesse Salazar (E'13), and Peter Wei (E'15), used a fluorogen-activating RNA sequence and a fluorogen-activating protein to create a biosensor that glows brighter in response to cellular activities. The CMU invention can be used to measure the output of other systems created using synthetic biology.
Learn more about CMU's iGEM team and their project, visit:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/october/oct12_syntheticbiology.html
To read about the CMU iGEM team's performance at the iGEM Americas East Regional Jamboree, visit:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/october/oct16_igemupdate.html
News Brief: CMU Wins Best Foundational Advance at iGEM Jamboree
A fluorescent biosensor that measures cellular activity, created by a team of Carnegie Mellon University undergraduates, earned the Best Foundational Advance prize at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition's World Championship Jamboree held Nov. 2-5 in Cambridge, Mass. For this year's competition, more than 190 teams from 34 countries used a tool-kit of standard, interchangeable biological parts to design and build biological systems that do not exist in nature. The teams first presented their work in Regional Jamborees, where 71 teams qualified to participate in the World Championship.
The Best Foundational Advance Prize is awarded to the team that creates a biological system that could help enable the success of other systems created using synthetic biology. The CMU students, Yang Choo (E'14), Eric Pederson (S'15), Jesse Salazar (E'13), and Peter Wei (E'15), used a fluorogen-activating RNA sequence and a fluorogen-activating protein to create a biosensor that glows brighter in response to cellular activities. The CMU invention can be used to measure the output of other systems created using synthetic biology.
Learn more about CMU's iGEM team and their project, visit:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/october/oct12_syntheticbiology.html
To read about the CMU iGEM team's performance at the iGEM Americas East Regional Jamboree, visit:
http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/october/oct16_igemupdate.html