Bangalore: How far can man push nature? Is it possible to design disparate parts and build novel biological devices just as engineers do in electronics?
That’s what 56 undergraduate teams from 20 countries did at the annual international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 4 November. And a group from Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) won a special prize for the best model.
The National Centre for Biological Sciences team that took home the ‘best model’ special prize
The model, built by a group of summer trainees (students who typically intern at companies between college terms) at NCBS, is the first ever direct demonstration of control theory in biological system. Control theory is a mathematical discipline that helps predict the behaviour of principle which tells one how to predict the behaviour of complex systems by looking at the characteristics of their underlying parts.
The team “earned the prize for their work in adapting powerful mathematical tools for use in analysing the behaviour of engineered genetic devices,” said Drew Endy, associate professor in biological engineering at MIT and a pioneer of this new discipline called synthetic biology. “It is critical to be able to describe the behaviour of engineered biological objects using computers, so that we can design more powerful genetic systems,” added Endy.
“This allows us to test a very large number of designs, and only actually build those designs that show the desired behaviour,” said Mukund Thattai, NCBS scientist who led the team.
Groups of scientists across the world are applying engineering to biology to create a catalogue of biological parts —genes, chromosomes, switches (which turn a gene off or on) and the like which can be used to synthesize a new organism. The idea is to build organisms that perform desired functions, rather than modifying existing organisms.
Inspired by the open source movement in software, MIT has created a registry of standard biological parts, called BioBrick Part, where researchers can register their parts and others can use it free of cost. Given that valuable and useful biological inventions are largely patent protected, scientists are clamouring for “cooperative world-wide development” of future biological technologies. According to Endy, because mankind and nature depend so much on biology, it is imperative that “future biological technologies are developed openly”.