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Thirteen students of the Chennai-based Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering (SVCE) have won the silver medal in ‘iGEM 2017’ competition. The iGEM is an international biotechnology competition held in Boston every year; SVCE students have won an award for the third time in a row.
In 2015, the first year SVCE participated, the students won a bronze; in the following two years, they won silver, according to a press release from the college.
“The team worked on foundational advancement of synthetic biology by developing novel genetic circuits using temperature and pH-based regulatory parts,” said M Sivanandham, a biotechnologist, who mentored the team.
‘Gene circuitry’ is an evolving body of knowledge in which biology tries to learn from the semi-conductor science. An electronic circuit there are sensors that pick up signals, internal logic circuits that determine a logical response to the signals picked up and actuators that provide the desired result. Gene circuits have biological equivalents of these — biological sensors, genetic logic gates and cellular mechanism for providing output. As a result, it is possible to engineer a genetic circuit to, say, repair a damaged part of the body — synthetic biology.
This was the area in which students of SVCE won Silver at Boston.
Elaborating on their work, Nalinkanth Ghone, Primary Investigator of the team and professor of biotechnology and chemical engineering at SVCE, explains that the application of genetic circuits is to provide a two-way switch for microbes to synthesise particular proteins. “The pH (a measure of acidity) and temperature can act as input regulator for that switch. For example, at low pH values one type of proteins, for higher pH values another type of proteins will be produced.”
Sivanandham, who is also the Secretary of Sri Venkateswara Educational and Health Trust, which runs SVCE, said that the college encourages and supports students financially in various co-curricular activities for generating innovative ideas and also promotes transformation of such ideas to start-ups, by providing funding through SVCE’s ‘Enterpreneurship Promotion and Incubation Centre’.
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