“I’m not looking for the prima donnas,” said Lynn Rothschild, an adjunct professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry and astrobiologist/evolutionary biologist at NASA Ames who helped advise this year’s Stanford-Brown iGEM, or International Genetically Engineered Machine, group. “We rise and fall as a team.”
Brown and Stanford University have worked together as an iGEM team for the past three years, and the 2013 group qualified for the world championship at the North America Regional Jamboree in Toronto last month.
Despite being locked out of their lab at NASA due to the government shutdown, team members rallied to present four projects to judges at the World Championship Jamboree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology this past weekend.
Though the 2013 team did not win any special awards and were not finalists this year, “we have a reputation as one of the really strong teams,” Rothschild said. “We have the coolness factor.”
All hands on deck
Six students from Brown and seven students from Stanford were selected for the 2013 team this past February.
Gary Wessel, professor of biology and the advisor for Brown’s contingent of the team, said team leaders take special care in selecting students from different academic backgrounds. “Having that extreme diversity adds a lot of fun to the team,” he said.
“One of the aspects that is really exciting (about iGEM) is that anyone can actually do it,” said Simon Vecchioni ’13, a co-captain. One member from Stanford is a communications major, another studies biology and history. Nguyen Le ’16 applied as a first-year with little experience in the field, but quickly became emersed with more experienced applicants who joined the team, Wessel said.
After team members are selected in February, they meet about once a week, Wessel said. When the semester ends, the students travel to Rothschild’s lab at the NASA Ames Research Center in California, where they work throughout the summer.
“The opportunity to work in a team is special,” Wessel said. “The iGEM concept really is a team concept.”
Even though the group combines students from two universities, they “really become one team,” Rothschild said. When the team members from Brown and Stanford saw each other in Toronto after being apart since the summer, outsiders would have thought they hadn’t seen each other in years, Rothschild said.
Sophia Liang ’15 and Trevor Kalkus, a senior at Stanford, said some of the best experiences at iGEM were outside of the lab. Kalkus said one of his favorite parts of the summer was camping in Yosemite National Park with members of the team.
Liang said when the team first arrived in California, they were unsure of their living situation and some of the team members ended up staying in a mobile home.
It was “a great bonding experience,” she said. “I sincerely had a great time living in a mobile village.”
Space mission
Rothschild said having three institutions — Brown, Stanford and NASA — working together is “unusual.” Working at NASA is a great opportunity for the students because they are exposed to life outside of academia and to researchers and students from around the world, she said.
Rothschild said iGEM “requires a lot of time and a lot of love.” While NASA was not originally enthusiastic about hosting the iGEM team, they are now realizing the benefits, she said.
“Especially for me as a foreign student from Vietnam, the idea of working in NASA is truly thrilling,” Le said.
Alissa Greenberg, a human biology and history major who graduated from Stanford in the spring, said iGEM is also an opportunity to be very hands-on. While she had “zero practical lab experience” before iGEM, the team is “at liberty to pursue any kind of project within reason that we want to.”
Wessel also described the program’s immersive nature.
“Normally we learn by reading books and papers … synthetic biology is the opposite. Your job is to design new things,” Wessel said.
While most teams only focus on one project, “this is a superstar group of 13 students who did four projects,” Rothschild said.
The first project, ‘BioWires,’ involves the construction of a one-atom thick wire that uses a strand of DNA as a structural template. The second project sought to create a bio-brick — a readily usable piece of DNA — which the team hopes will fight antibiotic resistance. Project three, ‘De-Extinction,’ seeks to bring ancestral genes back to life. The final project adds onto the 2011 Stanford-Brown iGEM team’s PowerCell, which releases fixated nitrogen and sugars in space so that bacteria can survive and replicate in the environment.
The last project is particularly exciting because it will be launched on a 2016 German space mission and the 2013 iGEM team focused on preparing the project for space, Rothschild said.
The show must go on
The 2013 iGEM team faced unique challenges due to the government shutdown, Rothschild said. After the regional competition in Toronto, the team was ready to do more experiments but was locked out of the NASA building.
One of Rothschild’s graduate students was able to go into the building for 15 minutes, during which she emailed people asking what they needed and gathered as many samples as she could. But not all of the experiments could be taken, and the shutdown impacted which tests were finished in time for the World Championship Jamboree, Rothschild said.
Greenberg said the experience made the team aware that a lot of science is only possible because of more powerful, larger institutions like the federal government.
Even without all of their experiments completed, the team presented at the World Championship Jamboree this past weekend. The team was judged on six components, Wessel said, which consist of a 20-minute presentation, a website, a poster presentation, outreach to the community, the number of BioBricks a team created and its actual research projects.
“In the past years there has been a ‘sweet 16’ which we made, but this year they didn’t list it,” Rothschild wrote in an email to The Herald. But the fact the team made the world finals “is still pretty impressive,” she wrote.
“I want (the students) to just have a ball,” Rothschild told The Herald. “I want to give them the joy of science.”
Kalkus said his favorite part of being at the competition was seeing teams from all over the world come together. “It’s a conglomeration of people united around science,” he said.
Vecchioni pointed to the satisfaction in making it to the world finalists as a team.
“We all started this together and we all finished this together,” Vecchioni said. “We came full circle.”
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