We are an interdisciplinary group of student and staff researchers in Duke University and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics engaging in the exploration of engineering principles and novel applications for the nascent field of synthetic biology.

Duke iGEM 2006 Team	Duke iGEM 2007 Team

Duke iGEM 2006 Team photo legend
left side, front row, left to right: John Lee, Eric Josephs, Hattie Chung
left side, middle row, left to right: Faisal Reza, Austen Heinz, Bryan Van Dyke
left side, back row, left to right: Jingdong Tian, Fan Yuan, Nicholas Tang
right side, left to right: Sagar Indurkhya, Pat OBrien, Keddy Chandran, Nirav Lakhani
not pictured: Matt Feltz, Thomas LaBean, Steven Lin, Lingchong You

Duke iGEM 2007 Team photo legend
left to right: Jingdong Tian, Nicholas Tang, Cory Li, Lisa Zhang, Yajing Gao, Eric Josephs, Faisal Reza
not pictured: Aamir Husain, Bruce Donald, Lingchong You, Fan Yuan

In 2006, through generous support from the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, the Pratt School of Engineering, and the Lord Foundation of North Carolina, our inaugural group developed four such systems with notable success:

1. Bacterial Dynamo (BD), for generating electricity using modified magnetotactic bacteria on a microfabricated device.
2. Cancer StickyBots (CSB), for targeting and destroying tumour cells using engineered E. coli cells.
3. Human Encryption (HE), an information encoding, storage, and retrieval scheme for potential future security and medical diagnostic applications.
4. X-Verter (XV), new strategies and tools for biological circuit design and BioBrick management.

While each of these systems had distinct aims, they shared a common philosophy of rationally building useful and beneficial synthetic biological systems using fundamental engineering principles. They also demonstrated the potential usefulness of BioBricks and contributed to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts and synthetic biology community-at-large.

These systems have been presented online and in public at Duke University and M.I.T.:

• research wiki
• research website
• presentation slides and video

and published in poster sessions and a peer-reviewed research journal:

• posters for BD, CSB, HE, XV
• journal citation is F. Reza, K. Chandran, M. Feltz, A. Heinz, E. Josephs, P. O’Brien, B. Van Dyke, H. Chung, S. Indurkhya, N. Lakhani, J. Lee, S. Lin, N. Tang, T. LaBean, L. You, F. Yuan and J. Tian. “Engineering Novel Synthetic Biological Systems.” IET Synthetic Biology, 2007, 1, (1-2), pp. 48-52.

and won many group and individual recognitions at the local, national, and international levels. These achievements speak to the promise and value of such an interdisciplinary group to advancing the frontier of synthetic biology and engineering.

In 2007, through continued support from the aforementioned sources our second group developed four more systems:

1. Chemical pathway-perturbed bioplastics, for biodegradable plastics.
2. Electric field-modulated transcription factors, for cellular activation from extracellular source.
3. Light-based intracellular communication, for an information exchange scheme based on light.
4. Photon-assisted fuel cell, for a biological battery.

These systems have been presented online and in public at Duke University and M.I.T.:

• research wiki
• presentation slides