One of the most important goals of the competition is to stock the shelves of the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a sort of hardware store of genetic parts housed at MIT. "The idea is to standardize parts and the way they are put together, in the same way electrical and mechanical parts are standardized," says Knight. "And to be able to give people a reasonable assurance that the parts, when put together, will function as they were designed to." During the course of its project, the MIT team has deposited about a dozen newly made parts into the registry for use by other members of the synthetic-biology community. As the number and complexity of parts grow, both students and industry and academic scientists can make ever-more-complicated designs. The machines entered in the 2006 iGEM competition have doubled in size in the past two years, from about 6,000 to 12,000 letters of DNA. "These [projects] represent the largest designed genetic systems that have ever been developed," says Chris Voigt, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Francisco, who is advising one of the student teams. "Understanding how to push the size and complexity of these systems is what is going to have an impact." Entries in this year's competition come from as far away as Africa and Japan, and will include a range of strange creations. Some are practical, such as a biosensor that can detect arsenic concentrations for use in tainted wells. Others are more whimsical, such as a bacterial night-light that glows when it gets dark. The oddest creation, perhaps, is the entry from the University of Freiberg, in Germany: a microscopic, DNA-based clothing line, christened "Barbie Nanoatelier" by the team. |
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Engineering Edible Bacteria
11/10/2008
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
VCRAGAIN
11/03/2006
Posts:35
Something like this is dangerous to the extreme as someone could just put it in a grocery store and noone would ever know where it came from. By then it's too late. Before some experiments with deadly bacteria in this way there needs to be government controls so where are they?
Stratos
11/05/2006
Posts:1
Flip
11/07/2006
Posts:18
Halfrag
11/09/2006
Posts:1
skosuri
11/09/2006
Posts:1
I don't know if even I am comfortable with this last paragraph of thought. To simply hope for the best seems to be an idiotic thought, though. The potential for catastrophe is enormous. I want to trust, but this is difficult.
mergatroidal
11/11/2008
Posts:7
microbeach
11/07/2006
Posts:2