Rice wins gold with ‘BioBeer’ at MIT’s iGEM competition

Rice wins gold with ‘BioBeer’ at MIT’s iGEM competition, hit by media tidal wave

BY JADE BOYD AND DAVID RUTH
Rice News staff

Rice University’s undergraduate team that entered ”BioBeer” into the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition Nov. 8-9 in Cambridge, Mass., came home with a gold medal and second place for best presentation. And their research has become a magnet for worldwide media attention.

”I couldn’t be happier with what this year’s team has accomplished,” said Jonathan Silberg, assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology and one of the team’s faculty advisers. ”They did a great job identifying a problem worthy of this competition, made significant progress on the implementation of their idea and gave an outstanding presentation at MIT.”

IGEM is the world’s largest synthetic biology competition, a contest where teams use a standard toolkit of DNA building blocks — think genetic LEGO blocks (called ”BioBricks”) — to create living organisms that do odd things.

The idea for BioBeer was born after last year’s competition at iGEM.

“After last year’s contest, we were sitting around talking about what we’d do this year,” said junior Taylor Stevenson. “(Graduate student) Peter Nguyen made a joke about putting resveratrol into beer, but none of us took it seriously.”

But why would someone want to make beer with resveratrol in the first place? Resveratrol is a naturally occurring compound that some studies have found to have anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer and cardiovascular benefits for mice and other animals. While it’s still unclear if humans enjoy the same benefits, resveratrol is already sold as a health supplement, and some believe it could play a role in the “French paradox,” the seemingly contradictory observation that the French suffer from relatively low rates of heart disease despite having a diet that’s rich in saturated fats.

So last spring the team began looking in earnest for a new project. They discovered a good bit of published literature about modifying yeast with resveratrol-related genes. When they looked further, they found two detailed accounts by teams that had attacked both halves of the metabolic problem independently.

“That was when we said, ‘You know, we could actually do this,'” said junior Thomas Segall-Shapiro.

One of the major challenges iGEM teams face is time. Many of the students work through the summer on their projects and then split their time between studies and research during the fall semester leading up to the competition in November. The Rice team was able to genetically modify a strain of brewer’s yeast in time for the competition and provide evidence that some of their BioBricks were functional. The team will continue the project even though the competition is done.

”These students have been amazingly productive in the lab,” Silberg said. ”They created more than a dozen new BioBricks and showed that their intermediate genetic circuits are functional when introduced into brewer’s yeast. They are now constructing and charactering their full genetic circuit that is predicted to cause yeast to produce resveratrol.”

What the team probably didn’t expect initially was the news media attention they would receive for this concept. Shortly after Rice News published a story about the team and its research being entered into the competition, media outlets around the globe picked up on the story — after all, the keywords “beer,” “students” and “health” do seem to stand out.

To date, the BioBeer team and their research have appeared in more than 350 media outlets nationally and internationally in radio, TV and print, including Nation Public Radio, Fox News Channel, CNN, the Houston Chronicle, Popular Science, Computerworld, Discovery.com and USA Today.

”Besides the fantastic work these students accomplished, they also shed light on a new industry, synthetic biology, with the public,” Silberg said. ”There are an increasing number of companies looking to synthetic biology for technologies that will help create a sustainable world, and the students who compete at iGEM represent the future leaders of this industry.”

In the “food and energy” catagory at iGEM, the Rice students were edged out by the team from Harvard and its ”Bactricity,” bacterial biosensors that produce electricity.

The other 2008 Rice BiOWLogists are sophomore Selim Sheikh, junior Arielle Layman, senior Sarah Duke, graduate student Justin Judd and faculty advisers Silberg, George Bennett and Beth Beason, all of Biochemistry and Cell Biology; Oleg Igoshin and Junghae Suh, both of Bioengineering; and Ken Cox of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.