Pak students win silver at IGEM competition

A group of Pakistani students has won a silver medal at an international competition arranged in the United States. The IGEM (International genetically engineered machines) competition is a lagship student competition that started in MIT and has been happening for the last 15 years with over 300 teams from across the globe.

The students, making Pakistan’s irst team, gathered at CECOS University Peshawar this summer to use the cutting-edge discipline of synthetic biology to solve one of the most pressing environmental challenges the country is facing.

This was done as a part of project by CECOS University in collaboration with the Directorate of Science and Technology (DOST), KP.

Like last year, the team was hosted by Dr Faisal Khan’s research lab at the Institute of Integrative Biosciences, CECOS University.

The team consisted of two girls and 10 boys from cities including Peshawar, Nowshera, Charsadda, Swabi, Mardan, Lahore, Attock, Islamabad, Multan, Faisalabad, and Khyber Agency. It was a diverse group of young scientists from across the country.

This year’s IGEM Peshawar team worked towards developing a reporter ish - a ish that can detect heavy metal contamination in fresh water and in response to it, change the color of its body.

The team designed and built the genetic (DNA) circuits needed for this function and tested them in bacterial cells.

The team believes this would have a direct impact on the livelihoods of ish farmers and the health of ish consumer across the country.

With this year’s inter-disciplinary team that included computer scientists and engineers, IGEM Peshawar also designed and developed a digital interface for the biosensor system which they named MAX.

MAX is an Arduino-based digital component which can be used by bacterial cells to automatically send the end-user (a ish farmer, for example) text alerts over the mobile phone.

This was for the irst time a human-bacterial interface was presented at the competition and got Silver Medal. “Who would have thought a bacterial culture could be plugged into an arduino,” said Dr Faisal Khan, the supervisor of the project.