Bacteria Project Wins International Energy Award

With a project titled “Bactricity,” a group of undergraduates became the first Harvard team to win an award at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Championship Jamboree held at MIT last weekend.

The team, mentored by medical school professors and graduate students, was chosen as one of the six finalists and won the Best Food or Energy Project award. Eighty-four teams representing 21 countries competed this year.

“Harvard has been participating for four years, and this is the most impressive we’ve ever performed,” said Pamela A. Silver, faculty director of iGEM at Harvard, who called the award “very exciting.”

The team researched the bacteria Shewanella oneidensis, affectionately known as Shewie. It is a specie capable of performing anaerobic metabolism in oxygen-poor environments and of donating electrons to surrounding substrates.

“A line of Shewies act as a wire, so they can actually transmit a current that we can harvest and measure,” explained Natalie G. Farny, a Harvard Medical School affiliate and mentor to the team.

For the competition, the team presented their work with IPTG, a chemical that augmented the amount of electricity produced in the bacteria with modified plasmids.

According to Anna Marie Wagner ’11, a team member, their work has immense potential applications in the area of biosensors.

“Imagine if arsenic was found in the water supply,” Wagner said. “By measuring the amount of electricity produced by the modified Shewies, we may be able to directly detect the level of contamination.”

The competition itself took place over two “intense” days, Silver said. Teams gave 20-minute presentations on Saturday, and the following day finalists from the competition’s six categories presented to an audience of around 1,500.

Every team had been given a standard kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer. Since iGEM, which began in 2003, does not give prompts, a diverse array of projects were presented. The grand prize went to Slovenia’s “Immunobricks,” a project that developed a vaccine.

Every year, projects created at iGEM are added to a standard registry that catalogues engineered pieces of DNA. According to Silver, the competition allows biologists to “give back to the [scientific] community.”

The Harvard team is already looking forward to next year’s competition, according to Farny, although they may also perform some more experiments and write a paper for publication.

“iGEM is a great idea that will revolutionize the way synthetic biology is done because it opens up the playing field for even undergraduates to participate,” Wagner said.