A team of 12 undergraduate students from Pakistan have brought laurels to the country by winning the bronze medal at the iGEM World Championship Jamboree which took place in Boston.
The talented team comprised of 5 girls and 7 boys. The students were selected from all parts of Pakistan including Karachi, Peshawar, Mardan, Swat, Kalat, Lahore, Waziristan and Hyderabad. KPK Directorate of Science and Technology sponsored the winning project along with the support of Cesco University.
International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition is a flagship student competition is happening for the past 15 years. It started in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Synthetic biology
Pakistan is currently facing one of the most pressing issues of environmental challenges. As a result, a team from all across Pakistan gathered in Peshawar this summer to solve this fluctuation by using cutting-edge discipline of synthetic biology.
The students had a penetrating crash course of synthetic biology in the first month besides having a molecular biology refresher. Furthermore, they were involved in a brainstorming session where they talked about problems which they could solve by using the ‘designer bug’ that they would create.
They selected to emphasis on air pollution and set out to create a bacteria-based biosensor. Subsequently, it could detect Carbon Monoxide and Nitrous Oxide and give out yellow and blue colors so a traffic warden could use it to test vehicle emissions on the spot and save valuable time and resources. It is pertinent to mention that emissions with both would give a green color.
Principal investigator, team supervisor and the director of the Institute of Integrative Biosciences at CECOS University, Dr. Faisal stated:
“We have been waiting for this moment to introduce synthetic biology in Pakistan. There was no better way than giving students the opportunity to do cutting edge biotechnology research. We cannot be playing with ‘Windows95’ in an age of ‘Android’ and ‘iOS’ and we desperately needed this upgrade in life sciences in the country”
As many as 300+ teams from all across the world participated in the competition this year. In 2015, 285 teams took part in the flagship competition.
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
