SPACE-P’s BIOTEC team wins bronze medal in Boston in the international student competition iGEM

A team of master students at the BIOTEC can be happy: their work for the international student competition iGEM was awarded with the bronze medal in September at the in Boston. The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. 259 multidisciplinary teams with over 2700 attendees from all over the world presented their projects at the iGEM Giant Jamboree on 24-28 September 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Most of the BIOTEC team members are students of the international Master’s program Molecular Bioengineering. Supervision was mainly under the Chair of Genomics at the BIOTEC. In their project “SPACE-P” for “Structural Phage Assisted Continuous Evolution of Proteins”, the team proposes an alternative way of identifying potential protein binding partners which could replace antibodies for certain applications. The goal was to speed up screening for peptides capable of interacting with other proteins. This should be achieved by combining the power of phage display with a bacterial two hybrid system under constant mutational pressure in a chemostat. The cyclic process of mutation and selection should result in finding a potent binding partner for a target protein in less than three days. A much more detailed description of the project and the team can be found at: http://2015.igem.org/Team:TU_Dresden