From ‘Honorable Mention’ to a Bronze Medal, each year Mississippi State’s iGEM team moves to a higher placing in international competition
November 9, 2007
Earning a bronze medal means the Bagley College of Engineering’s (BCoE), iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines), team placed in the top three tiers among 54 universities from around the world whose teams competed at the iGEM2007 Competition. World renowned biological engineering teams representing universities such as the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, Harvard, Caltech, Princeton, and Cambridge entered their innovative biological engineering research projects to prove a point–that engineering techniques can be used to design, simulate and implement the structures and functions of biological systems to solve real-life problems.
Dr. Filip To is the BCoE’s iGEM advisor. He said this new field of knowledge is known as synthetic biology and has been in existence for a relatively short time—less than 10 years.
“This means our students are among the early pioneers and in the future they will be able to provide solutions to problems that don’t exist today,” To said. “For instance the entries in the competition were really impressive, they included innovations and research to create an AIDS virus detector, to projects such as ours that expedites the process of finding the gene and genetic pathways in plants that are responsible in regulating the production of lipid (oil).”
The Mississippi State iGEM team designed a genetic component (part) that accelerates the detection method for identifying which combination of tagging genes are responsible for regulating fat in plants. Their goal is to eventually figure out how to produce alternative oil crops. Experts could use the knowledge gleaned by the team’s research to produce oil (fuels) from non-food plants or to make plants to produce healthier and higher value food.
The bronze medal team members are:
James Kastrantas, senior, biological engineering
Lauren Beatty, senior, biological engineering
Joseph Chen, senior, biological engineering
Scott Tran, senior, biological engineering
Sam Pote, sophomore, biological engineering
Caleb Dulaney, sophomore, biological engineering
Robert Morris, graduate student, biological engineering,
Victor Ho, graduate student, biological engineering