Bioengineering Gold[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 1, No. 18 12 - 26 November 2007 ] University of Melbourne students won a team Gold Medal and shared a category prize at iGEM 2007, an international Genetically Engineered Machine competition held in Boston last week. iGEM, an initiative of MIT, promotes research into synthetic biology. Teams compete to design and assemble bio-engineered ‘machines’ using advanced genetic components and technologies. iGEM provides a library of standardised ‘BioBricks’ which the students can use and also encourages them to make their own, for which it offers a Best BioBricks prize – this year shared by Melbourne and Cambridge universities. Melbourne won Gold for its use of intersecting light beams to form a fluorescent body of E. coli in a suspension – a building system the team calls ‘coliforming’. The team sees coliforming offering a way to build complex extracellular scaffolds for possible use in tissue engineering. Undergraduate team members are Alisa Sedghifar (Genetics/Pure Mathematics), Patricia Illing (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology/Cell Biology), Katarzyna Kinga Krysiak (Biomedical Engineering), Phillip Dodson (Electrical Engineering/Biomedical Science), Lei Xing (Software Engineering/Biochemistry and Molecular Biology/Mathematics and Statistics), and Craig Hamilton (Genetics/Biochemistry and Molecular Biology). Also in the team are Masters student Jan Zimak (Biomedical Engineering) and Associate Professors Paul Gooley and Heung-Chin Cheng (Biochemistry and Molecular Biology).
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