Sorry to get this post up somewhat late, the afternoon has been somewhat hectic. Slovenia once again had an extremely strong project and in the opinion of the judges were deserving of the grand prize.

Slovenia developed some very nice vaccine technology to fight Helicobacter pylori. The first part of the project was to engineer a live Helicobacter strain that expresses an antigen to trigger both the innate and adaptive immune response. The second half of the project involved engineering a constitutively active variant of TLR (toll-like receptor) to remove the requirement for receptor agonists. The latter has the potential to be a novel general strategy for developing vaccines.

Congratulations also to Freiburg and Caltech who were first and second runner’s up respectively.

Thanks are due to the organizers and the judges for such a well-organized weekend.

(The image above shows some of the crowd during the award ceremony and Tom Richard, head judge, bathed in light).

Quick update. Last night the judges whittled down the teams to six finalists. They are all presenting once more this morning before the grand prize winner is awarded.

The finalists are - Berkeley, Caltech, Slovenia, NYMU Taipei, Freiburg, and Harvard.

Berkeley just did a great job and Caltech is up next…

Stay tuned.

(not genetically encoded)

Turns out that being a judge requires one to actually be a judge rather than write blog posts. Grabbing a few minutes to write a post while a somewhat nervous team peppers their presenter with questions to make sure they are ready to give the talk.

The second session this morning was very interesting. Princeton is attempting to implement logical circuits at the level of neuronal cells. They described an implementation of a bistable switch made up of two neuronal cells and a pacemaker cell. Very neat. I also really enjoyed the Taipei team who are working to engineer commensal E. coli to act as a bacterial dialysis machine. It’s a big project that is going to take a lot of work but they have laid out what needs to get done very nicely.

It’s 10.30am on Saturday morning and I’ve been to two meetings and three talks so far today. iGEM must have started.

One of my meetings was the pre-game meeting for judges. Great to see how seriously the judges are taking the job of judging 80 diverse teams all of whom are giving oral presentations and posters over the course of 8 hours. Tom and Drew, the head judges have done a really nice job of putting a system in place to ensure everyone is judged fairly. The 35 judges have a long day ahead of them…

I’ll be covering the health and medicine track today. We’ve already had the chance to see Calgary talking about engineering bugs to sense and kill pathogens in hosts, Strasbourg gave a nice presentation about their work to build a binary cell division counter in yeast, and finally University of Chicago presented their work to express sticky proteins (normally only made in mussels) in heterologous hosts such as E. coli and Caulobacter. Of note, two of the three teams I saw this morning were first-time teams. iGEM growth continues to be impressive.

On to the next session…

To cap an exceptional week (Gobama!), over 1000 students, advisors, and other interested parties are arriving at MIT for the annual iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machines) competition this weekend. Over eighty teams will be presenting the results of the projects they have been working on feverishly all summer (and right up until late last night in many cases). Read more »

Tim O’Reilly on what companies should be doing during these dark economic days: “Work on stuff that matters“. Of course, this is probably good advice regardless of the economic outlook.

Tim talks about “[sensing] a storm coming” and we may actually be entering storm season with an uncertain energy future, an ever increasing world population to be fed, and an ever increasing environmental stress on the planet. These challenges are among the largest our society have faced and are going to require creative solutions on a scale we have little experience dealing with. At Ginkgo, we believe that biological technologies have the capacity to scale to address global problems. So for us “working on stuff that matters” today means developing the foundational technologies that will give society a shot at weathering the storm fronts that are just over the horizon.

There’s been some buzz over the past few months about how to use government funding to kickstart your new business.  Forbes had an article about MIT spin-out IntAct Labs getting some money from NASA and the Department of Agriculture.  There was also an MIT Enterprise Forum on the topic.  It makes sense … non-diluting capital is a no-brainer way to get a startup going.

What these folks don’t tell you is the hoops you have to jump through just to be eligible to apply.  So here’s a quick how-to.

[Disclaimer: These are the order of steps that we've been able to figure out so far.  We make no guarantees that the info is accurate, so use at your own risk!]

1.  Form a corporation or LLC in Delaware or your home state.

2.  Register to do business in your home state and city.

3.  Apply for a DUNS number (takes 1 business day)

4.  Obtain an employer identification number (takes 2 weeks to show up in IRS records)

5.  Get a corporate bank account (can be done in an hour)

Make sure you get the EFT ABA routing number, the account number and the Automated Clearing House (ACH) point of contact at your bank.

6.  Register with CCR (takes a couple of business days)

Also check out the CCR handbook.

Recently the Ginkgo team had the pleasure of paying a visit to NEB in Ipswich, MA, and Reshma gave a talk on some of our past and current work. For those of you who’ve never heard of NEB (impossible if you’re a biologist, quite likely if you’re anything else), NEB was started in the mid-1970s and largely grew up around recombinant DNA technology. NEB is perhaps most famous for their expertise in restriction enzymes, even folks like Rich Roberts hang out there. We have long been relying on NEB’s EcoRI, XbaI, SpeI, and PstI to assemble BioBrick™* parts.

NEB is pretty unusual in that it is a privately held company that uses proceeds from its reagent business to fund basic science research. Its a nice ideal for Ginkgo to shoot for: make great tools for synthetic biology and then use those tools and the resulting resources ($$$) to go engineer cool new biological systems.

Synthetic biology is in dire need of better tools to make engineering biology easier. The challenge is not to figure out what to do but where to start. At Ginkgo, we think a lot about the engineering design cycle (design->construction->testing). We need better CAD tools for design, better parts and assembly processes to make construction faster, and better measurement techniques so that we know what’s happening with our engineered systems.

*BioBrick™ is a trademark of The BioBricks Foundation.

Ginkgo BioWorks and co-founder Reshma Shetty profiled in Forbes Magazine as part of the DIY technology movement.