Enterprising Mind of the Year Award Winners 2018
The inaugural Enterprising Mind of the Year Award 2018 was won by Morganne Wilbourne and Izzy Dunstan. Based on their studies in BL2309 Applied Molecular Biology, Morgan and Izzy recruited a large team of staff and students and raised substantial funding to compete in an international genetic engineering competition. After a positive initial experience, they are entering the competition again this year.
Transcript:
I’m Morganne Wilbourne, and I’m Izzy Dunstan. Last year, based on the BL2309 Applied Molecular Biology module, we revived the St Andrews iGEM team, a group of students who competed in a synthetic biology project over the summer of 2018. In the spring semester, Dr. Anne Smith gave a short lecture series covering topics in synthetic biology for the Applied Molecular Biology module. She taught us about the ways in which synthetic biology incorporates the principles of engineering into biology, including the importance of standardized genetic parts and a design, test, revise cycle. Following her lessons, we recruited a team and extended the material Dr. Smith taught us to compete in iGEM.
iGEM is essentially a genetic engineering competition aimed at undergraduate students, and we had heard of it in March, just before Dr. Smith gave her lectures. We wanted to participate, but didn’t know where to start, and Dr. Smith’s experience with synthetic biology made her an obvious member of staff to contact. She’d supervised iGEM teams before, the last time being in 2012, and had the experience we needed to get started. On the other hand, we had the drive and the passion to recruit a team of fellow undergraduates, all before the final registration deadline at the end of April. When all was said and done, we had raised more than 20,000 pounds, recruited nearly 20 students to work on the project, and convinced a total of 6 members of staff to help supervise.
While we were planning the initial stages of the project, the team considered ideas and proposals from several of the members, and then challenged and critically analysed the concepts so that our final idea satisfied each of the project requirements to earn a medal in the iGEM competition. In the end, our team built upon the information Dr. Smith presented during her lectures to create a system which tested the effectiveness of potential lead compounds for antibiotic development. The crux of the project relied on a protein which glowed when cells died, and we also explored ways to detect the formation of biofilms—sticky scaffolding that some bacteria use to colonize their hosts.
In October, the team traveled to Boston to attend the culminating conference for iGEM, where we earned a bronze medal. This year, we have already selected the new team and begun raising funds for our next project. We intend to take what we learned, both from the Applied Molecular Biology module and from our experience competing last year, to complete all of the competition requirements and take home a gold medal next fall. It’s been an incredibly instructive exercise for us to evaluate the things we accomplished last year so that we can more effectively help this year’s team plan and execute an even more complex project. Over all though, iGEM has been an amazing experience for us, and we’re excited to continue developing the team infrastructure so that many years of students to come may participate.