By Delynda Pilon

Technical, challenging and vital.

Those are just three words to describe the competition Alex Grigg, who graduated from Senator Gershaw School in 2009, is now involved in at the University of Calgary.

Grigg is a biomedical magor within the Bachelor of Health Sciences program at the university. Upon graduation, he hopes to apply to medical school.

This summer he is busy being part of an eight person undergraduate team with two graduate students takin part in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competion.

Students involved have the summer to design and develop a project which is presented at the iGEM jamoree held annually at the Massachusetts Institute of Tecknology. This year, Griggs said, their are over 128 teams competing from the world’s most prestigious universities.

“Synthetic biology is a rapidly expanding science which combines biological science and engineering to create systems operating in living cells that  can be used to solve a vast array of problems. Past iGEM projects have been very diverse, from bacteria that can detect arsenic in drinking water, to yeast that has been modified to create beer containing cancer fighting agents,” said Griggs via e-mail.

He explains the particular project his team is working on as a biological toolkit.

“This year our team is working on creating a biological “toolkit” for use by other synthetic biology researchers and iGEM teams that identifies what is specifically wrong with a protein that is not properly being expressed. Improper protein expression refers to the steps within a cell in which proteins can be improperly assembled or folded so that they are not able

to properly carry out their function. This kind of kit is useful in a huge range of scientific disciplines, such as medical uses in synthesizing insulin, and using biosensors to detect toxins in drinking water. We can tell if there is a protein being improperly assembled by using different fluorescence proteins, which are DNA sequences that code for proteins that glow a certain colour when activated by our system.”

“Since iGEM is a multi-disciplinary competition,  we are also working on a computer modeling and ethics component for our project. The modeling component is creating a computer model that can simulate our system so that we can manipulate variables and optimize output of the fluorescent proteins.  Ethical considerations about our project also have to be made,

as well as the ethics of synthetic biology as a science. For our ethics component, we recently went a trip to Suffield and held discussions about bioterrorism with researchers at Defence Research and Development(DRDC) Suffield, and also spoke to members of the Canadian Counter-Terrorism Centre (CTTC).”

Team members include five undergraduates team  majoring in biomedical science - Emily Hicks, Himika Dastidar, Dev Yvas, Raida Kwhaja, and Grigg. Two students are majoring in biological sciences; Jeremy Choo, and Chris Tang. Patrick Wu is majoring in bioinformatics. The two undergraduate supervisors, Dave Curran and Paul Adamiak, are both graduates of the Bachelor of Health Sciences program and are working with microbiology and infectious diseases.