Last year, NCSSM seniors Morgan Howell and Param Sidhu decided to defy the odds and vie for a medal at the collegiate level of the iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machines) competition.

Representing Duke University this October at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, they stood toe to toe against university juniors and seniors from 43 schools, some of them the nation’s most prestigious. And the two unicorns walked away proudly holding a silver medal, beating out top-tier university teams such as Yale.

Germinated from a 2003 special four-week MIT course in genetics, the iGEM competition is now a worldwide competition designed to give students professional lab experience in the emerging field of synthetic biology, a pioneering branch in the field of genetics.

Although synthetic biology is an endeavor usually fielded by advanced university undergraduates and graduate students, Sidhu and Howell felt prepared for the rigors of the discipline, and they emerged from iGEM energized for more study within the field.

They didn’t know each other before the competition, but what a difference nearly 1,300 research hours together makes. Some stints in the lab stretched to 13 hours this summer. But it paid off. The two NCSSM seniors showed up at the competition more than ready to hold their own against their university competitors.

“This contest is a big deal for the more prestigious universities,” said Howell. “At schools like Stanford and MIT, the standards for even applying to compete in iGEM are super-rigorous. You’ve got to be a junior or senior to even hope to be on the team.”

Seniors Param Sidhu and Morgan Howell expose blue light to a yeast sample to activate cellular processes.

The entire 2012 Duke iGEM team was composed of Sidhu and Howell, along with NCSSM alum Peter Fan, currently a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, who acted as chaperone to the NCSSM seniors – iGEM regulations require that an undergraduate be on the team. Fan was one of three high school students on the 2011 Duke iGEM team.

Under the mentorship of NCSSM chemistry instructor Myra Halpin and Duke University synthetic biologists Charles Gersbach and Nick Buchler, Howell and Sidhu devised  and successfully completed their proposal – they engineered yeast cells to trigger gene expression when exposed to blue light.

“Actually, when we first started out we had a really ambitious proposal,” said Sidhu.

“We came into the lab thinking we were going to cure cancer,” Howell grimaced.

Initially they wanted to use emulsion-based nanoparticles to delivery zinc-finger nuclei, but the prospectus was too ambitious.

“What we were proposing could be done – if you had a team of seven graduate students and a million dollar budget. We soon found out that we needed to make a more realistic approach,” Howell said.

“This was our first exposure to real research, and we found that although you might be able to think of an idea, there’s no guarantee that  it actually works,” added Param.

So the team recalibrated their expectations, and with the help of Gersbach and Buchler decided on an emerging field called optogenetics, named in 2010 by the journal Nature as the “method of the year.” In brief, optogenetics uses light to stimulate cellular processes.

“It’s a trigger – turn the light on, and it activates something within a cell,” said Sidhu.

The team used a system designed by Chandra Tucker from the University of Colorado Denver. Tucker provided Sidhu and Howell with the two hybrid proteins and accompanying plasmids that her team used for its work.

Ultimately, Howell and Sidhu worked with custom yeast strains and blue light to trigger transcription — the conversion of DNA to RNA. According to the team’s wiki, the goal of their work was to develop a toolkit for more  rapid and cost-efficient identification of gene therapeutic targets.

The big idea behind iGEM is the advancement of the field of synthetic biology by compiling an open-source library of “BioBricks,” standardized genetic parts that can be mixed and matched to engineer genetic tools. The BioBricks are collected and registered in a Registry of Standard Biological Parts.

The annual iGEM competition is designed to be a sounding board for synthetic biology.

“The reason iGEM was created in the first place was to spread awareness of synthetic biology because it’s a relatively new field,” said Howell.

What synthetic biology does is analogous to building a car from parts, or creating a computer program from code. Researchers in synthetic biology isolate genetic parts and then piece them together to engineer new tools  for therapeutic or other purposes.  In essence, it allows researchers and practitioners to create brand-new genetic code that has been “characterized,” or codified, by other synthetic biologists and stored in the Registry.

What’s new about synthetic biology is that, rather than fine-tune or correct existing genetic structures, it creates whole new genetic possibilities from disparate parts, in essence engineering new, DNA-programmed genetic machines.

By assembling genes in new ways, synthetic biologists can build sophisticated tools that far outstrip the possibilities offered by traditional genetic engineering, which usually works with one gene at a time. In a matter of months, iGEM teams can design and build what might have taken years to produce using standard genetic techniques.

And in just nine years, iGEM students have added thousands of parts to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The iGEM foundation is dedicated to this open community and collaboration, as well as to education and competition, and the advancement of synthetic biology.

So what’s next for the Sidhu and Howell?

“When I first came to Science and Math I wanted to pursue medicine,” said Sidhu, “but my interests have changed a lot because of what  iGEM showed me. What I’m more interested in now is medical utilities. If you can make a utility, you can have an impact on a large amount of people—for example, if you make an improved MRI machine.”

“For me,” said Howell, “coming to Science and Math I was really interested in medical genetics – diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Once I got my feet wet, I became polarized toward the computational sciences and really found a knack for automating the process, and, going back to what Param said, can affect a large amount of people.”

Both have their sights set on Yale University, and  have already been in touch with Yale’s iGEM team: “They’re doing a lot of cool stuff up there,” said Howell.

Howell and Sidhu will be leading an iGEM seminar this year for NCSSM students. They plan to form an NCSSM iGEM team for the 2013 high school iGEM, which takes place in July, as well as another Duke iGEM team for the collegiate competition, which takes place in October.

“We’re going to accept 10–12 students for a synthetic biology seminar, where we have a lecture and lab component,” Sidhu said. “We’ll try to teach them everything at a very fast  pace, and we’ll draw from these students to form our Duke and NCSSM iGEM teams, and then they’ll proceed to do a project and get to the competitions.”