At a first glance, biology seems to have little to do with the engineering sciences. Biologists wishing to develop a structure that fulfils specific functions are obliged to work with complex systems whose behaviour is not fully known. On the other hand, engineers design technical devices mainly on the computer. Thereby they can fall back on a host of standardised components with precise characteristics to help them. In view of the progress made in biotechnology more and more researchers are attempting to copy approaches from the engineering sciences, hence making biology "engineerable" too.

The international student competition "iGEM 2005" (1)(2), which took place this summer, was dedicated to this interesting emerging subject of "synthetic biology". In addition to a number of world-class US universities ETH Zurich was also represented with a multi-disciplinary team that included electro engineers, machine engineers, computer scientists and biologists. The ETH Executive Board gave financial support to the undertaking and the team was supervised by professors from seven ETH departments. The team travelled to Boston at the beginning of November to present their final work at MIT. (3)

Learning new things

In the preceding months students had to work on solutions to a self-chosen problem. "Although we only announced the competition just before summer recess, we still got applications from 20 candidates," says Jörg Stelling, assistant professor in the ETH Department of Computer Science. "12 of them–including PhD students and undergraduates–were finally chosen for the team." "For me," says Christophe Dessimoz, PhD student at the ETH Department of Computer Science. "taking part in this was especially interesting from a scientific point of view." And his fellow student Alexander Roth corroborates this, "We learned a lot and have discovered new areas over the past few months".

After a starting phase of around a month, the team agreed on the construction of a biological counter. With such a tool one could determine, for example, how often a cell divided. "Building components like these are standard in computer science, but still strangers in biology. The students developed the idea independently," explains Sven Panke, assistant professor at the ETH Institute of Process Engineering. The ETH team designed a structure that consists of a number of sequentially conntected devices that communicate via standardised interfaces. "We are using standardised DNA sequences, so-called 'BioBricks' to build the devices," explains Roth. Nowadays, BioBricks can be ordered from a catalogue in the same way as one would put in an order for electronic building components. How close thinking in the engineering sciences has already come to this can be judged by a glance through the catalogue where one finds column headings like "inverter", "protein generator" or "cell-cell signalling".

Not yet ideal

After the students had designed their devices they had the newly developed building components synthesised by a specialist company. "By doing it like this one saves a lot of time compared to conventional do-it-yourself constructions," says Panke. Such biological devices cannot yet however be produced as easily as other engineering devices. This is partly because the standard components cannot yet be defined with sufficient accuracy and that they therefore do not always behave in the way one had imagined. On the other hand, the students still had to develop some of the necessary BioBricks for themselves. The ETH team was thus unable to construct the final version of their counter for the presentation in Boston. "But we now want to finish this job within the next few months," says Dessimoz.

The successful team, together with supervisors, in Boston MA for the final round. large

The counter developed by the team from ETH consists of various devices, which are built up from standardised DNA sequences. large

Panke is extremely pleased with the effort the young researchers put into their work. "In the final three weeks leading up to the final in particular, the team worked amazingly." Faced with the competition from Harvard, Stanford or Princeton the students didn't want to leave themselves open to ridicule. And gratification wasn't absent when the ETH team saw that they were able to hold their own against their competitors from the very best US universities. The jury awarded the Swiss representatives with a number of prizes. "This was a very positive experience for the students," says Stelling.

Deepened preparations

A further competition is planned for next year. It is also hoped that other European universities will take part–supported by already granted EU funding–as well as teams from Asia. In preparation for this competition, Panke and Stelling, together with Eckart Zitzler, assistant professor with the ETH Department of Information Technology and Electronics, want to organise a lecture on synthetic biology in next year's summer term.