The Griffon News

Biology and math students have made Western proud; in a competition against schools such as Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley, they took home four awards.

At the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Jamboree held at MIT in November, the Western team consisted of two faculty members: professor and chair of biology Todd Eckdahl and assistant professor of mathematics Jeffrey Poet, six Western students: Adam Brown, Trevor Butner, Brad Ogden, Marian Broderick, Eric Jessen and Kelly Malloy, and one Central High School student: Lane Heard.

They received a first place award for Best Presentation. Along with their collaborators from Davidson College, they won second place awards for Best Poster and Best Cooperation and Collaboration. A third place award for Best Conquest of Adversity brought the total awards to four.

The 2006 iGEM competition saw 34 research teams from around the world present their work.

“All of us worked equally on the project,” Ogden said. “We helped one another. We wouldn’t have gotten this far otherwise.”

The question each group had to answer is if biological systems could be engineered to carry out useful functions. The Western team used the Hin-hix recombination system in E. coli to make a rudimentary bacterial computer that can address a mathematics puzzle called the Pancake Problem. That led to the title of the Western iGEM presentation: “iHOP meets iGEM.”

“This is an outstanding achievement,” Eckdahl said. “It is one we are able to shout from the mountain tops and brag about on behalf of our students. I’m really proud of their
efforts.”

The team has successfully completed one pancake flip. While this may not seem like much, Odgen is content.

“We were only able to finish one, which in of itself is still quite the accomplishment because some of the research groups that brought their projects to the iGEM competition hadn’t gotten that far,” Odgen said.

Winning this prestigious iGEM award came with a cost, as the students had to work hard. For example, Odgen and Brown worked over their Christmas break to make progress on the project.

The biology and mathematics team will include a new group of students this year and plans to continue the joint effort. They have more to research.

“This is a test to see if we can use these organisms to solve a math problem in this way,” Brown said. “This could be used so someone else can find another math problem that is harder to solve for use in a biological system.”

They are striving to make more flips and create harder math problems. As if this was not enough, Brown said they are concentrating their efforts on learning more about the Hinhix system.

“The whole process of being able to go from start to finish on a project was very rewarding,” Brown said.