From High School to International Triumph
They came. They genetically engineered. They conquered.
After a summer at UCSF working on their own genetic engineering project, six students just out of high school and one undergraduate have just taken one of the top honors in an international competition among universities as familiar as Caltech and distant as Peking University.
The contest, known as the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, is sponsored by MIT, and included teams from MIT, Harvard, Princeton and about 20 European and Asian universities.
College undergraduates aiming for careers in engineering or biotechnology make up nearly all the teams. The UCSF-based team of high school grads and one college undergrad were advised by UCSF graduate students and postdoc mentors. The team ended up with a gold medal for the highest level of presentation of their scheme to fashion a new kind of organelle inside a living cell.
"Their demonstration really blew the judges away," said Wendell Lim, PhD, UCSF professor of cellular and molecular biology and one of the team's hosts last summer.
"It was like being in the Olympics," said Eric Meltzer, one of the team's high school grads. "The judges announced the winning teams one by one, and our team was called second to last. We started cheering when we heard our team name."
"These young people were amazing," Lim said. "At the start of the summer program, they were a little tentative, but at the competition, they totally wowed the audience with their sharp presentation and the ability to respond right to the heart of the judges' very challenging questions. We are really proud of them."
The students' participation is a partnership between UCSF and Abraham Lincoln High School, part of the San Francisco Unified School District. The school has an unusual two-year biotechnology curriculum led by teachers Julie Reis and George Cachianes. Reis and Cachianes developed their course with support from the Genentech Foundation.
The team was supported in part by the NSF Synthetic Biology and NIH Nanomedicine research centers at QB3, directed by Lim. UCSF postdoctoral fellow Sergio Peisajovich was scientific director of the program, and specialist Nili Sommovilla was coordinator.
Compartmentalization is critical, undergrad Michael Chen explained, since many cell processes would harm the rest of the cell if they weren't isolated in an organelle. The lysosome that degrades unneeded proteins could destroy vital cell parts. The chemical process that creates energy-rich ATP in the mitochondria compartment involves toxic intermediate steps which also must be sequestered.
"If we wanted a new organelle to become, let's say, a drug- or biofuel-producing site inside a cell, the first step would be to create the new organelle by marking it with its own phosphate bar code. That's what the team has been trying to do," Chen said. Over the summer, the team made substantial steps in engineering molecular machines that could create this new phosphate based code.
"What this experience really emphasizes is learning about biological principles by creative experimentation, rather than memorization of facts," said Lim. "It complements the curriculum developed at Lincoln High. These kids are great. If they follow the trajectory they are on, they could easily become biotech leaders."
Jimmy Huang, one of the students on the UCSF-based team and now a freshman at UC Davis, filed a blog on the team's experience. An excerpt is posted on the Open Wetware wiki.
The UCSF team, in its orange team T-shirts, prepares to present their project to the judges at the MIT iGEM jamoboree (from left to right, Alex Ng, Eric Chou, David Pincus, Eric Meltzer, Sergio Peisajovich, Lauren Jann, Michael Chen, Nili Sommavilla, Robert Ovadia).
UCSF Team Selected as Finalist
In the two-day competition at MIT Nov. 3 and 4, each team presented its genetic engineering project to a panel of judges. The judges selected the UCSF team and five others as finalists. Each of the finalists then presented its vision and progress to an audience of all the competitors.The team's project was to make organelles with a unique molecular code. This image shows yeast cells that have the putative new organelle (bright green dots). The team is completing experiments to confirm if these compartments have the properly engineered molecular identity.
The Theory Behind the Project
Most cells, from yeast to humans, have many kinds of compartments or organelles, each isolated from the rest of cell, and each charged with a different task. Energy for the cell is generated in the mitochondria, for example, while organelles called lysosomes act as a kind of garbage disposal, degrading unneeded cell material.The UCSF team celebrates winning a finalist award at the iGEM jamboree by making a human pyramid on the MIT campus (from left to right, top, David Pincus, Alex Ng; middle, Robert Ovadia, Eric Chou, Michael Chen; bottom, Sergio Peisajovich, Wendell Lim, Jimmy Huang, Eric Meltzer; front, Lauren Jann, Nili Sommavilla).