Best Information Processing Project
Bacterial Relay Race: The team wanted to build an improved cell to cell communication system. They choose this subject since most applications or tasks in their synthetic biological systems were generally completed by a population of cells, not a single cell. Gaining new insights into cell to cell communication and designing manageable cell to cell communication systems allows for a wide range of new possibilities. Manageable cell to cell communication systems could have applications in different fields like therapeutic applications or fermentation technology applications. They attempted to construct an E.coli strain which is capable of passing a GFP signal through conjugation to other E.coli cells only once, with communication appearing population wide. Their work built on projects of previous iGEM teams from UC Berkeley and Peking University.