CH Major wins prestigious iGEM Award
Senior Doug Tischer spent his '08 summer working in a lab at CalTech as part
of a team of five students competing in the International Genetically Engineered Machines (IGEM) competition. The team worked on a number of interconnecting projects, all designed to produce bacteria that instead of causing disease, actually provide benefits to the human host: help fight bacterial infection, increase lactose tolerance, increase folate production (potentially eliminating folate deficiency related birth defects), and help digestion. Further, the goal was to produce bacteria that could switch from one function to the other as needed. After the summer’s work was done, the 84 iGEMs teams from all over the world met at MIT the second weekend in November to present their work to judges. Doug’s team advanced to the finalist round, requiring a second presentation on Sunday. The results announced later that day placed Doug’s team, the smallest team to make the finals, as second runner up – but the highest placing US team, the highest placing team that used only bacteria and winner of the synthetic standard award. Check out the cool things the team did at http://2008.igem.org/Team:Caltech and learn more about iGEM at http://2008.igem.org/Main_Page.
Last modified: January 22, 2009 10:32:40