One of the most prominent causes of environmental pollution is the use of pesticides. Commercial pesticides, especially, are often made from harmful chemicals that degrade natural habitats. Since insect pests are developing resistance to these pesticides at a faster rate, pesticide use has increased, further harming the natural world. URochester undergraduate students in the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) program have been working to find and develop a solution to this problem.
iGEM was originally founded in 2003 by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). They wanted to build biological systems from the DNA of living things that serve different purposes by applying techniques from engineering. It then began to spread across the world as a platform in synthetic biology, a field which merges biology with engineering.
URochester Biology professor Anne Meyer, the faculty mentor for URochester’s iGEM, has been involved with iGEM and synthetic biology since 2012. When she first heard about this field while working at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, she became fascinated with the way scientists can design DNA and bacteria for different purposes.
“Synthetic biology is an interesting field that kind of marries bioengineering with biology,” she said. “It’s so unusual for undergraduates to have the chance to choose their own research topic from scratch … [The students will] think about what are interesting new biological approaches that could be interesting views. What are real-world problems that could be targeted by DNA engineering?”
This year’s iGEM project, V.E.R.D.A.N.T., which stands for Vip3A (a protein with insecticidal properties) Engineered Response for Defense Against Natural Threats, is centered around agriculture.
A group of 15 undergraduates have been divided into different teams that each focus on a specific aspect of the project, such as wet lab (working with chemicals and other biological agents), logic and concepts, hardware, and press release. Science Manager Gaven Giauque and Team Lead Norah DeMayo, both juniors, described the science behind their pesticide, made from bacteria, and how it is more effective than traditional pesticides and helps the environment.
“Plants naturally produce this signal whenever they are threatened, and this can be uptaken by different organisms, [and] it can be converted to its active form, salicylic acid, which can then induce gene expression to have our bacteria fight against the pest,” Giauque explained. “Our project is trying to respond to natural plant stress signals that they produce whenever they are attacked by these pests and make the pesticide then and there, so it only kills the pests whenever there is an active threat.”
DeMayo emphasized how this pesticide reduces the need for frequent commercial pesticide applications. “When [pesticides] are sprayed on plants all the time, insects can develop resistance really easily because the stress is so high that they’re really forced to, but with ours, we only wanted to respond to the plant stress signal [and] only produce when it’s needed. And that would make it so the insects are against less stress and they’ll develop resistance more slowly, and that’ll hopefully make our pesticide more effective.”
Junior Isla Ablin echoed Giauque’s and DeMayo’s theories, saying, “The whole idea is to make it so that you wouldn’t have to use it as a pesticide.”
To join iGEM, students are required to apply for the program during the spring semester and register for the course BIOL 228A/B, which takes place over two semesters, including the summer between that fall and spring. Once they are enrolled, team members brainstorm ideas for the calendar year’s project while performing early experimentation during the summer. This fall semester, the various team members, each in different groups, have been hard at work with different tasks such as running tests on the effectiveness of their pesticide, building the hardware to apply the pesticide, and generating publicity.
Hardware Manager and sophomore Sophia Fietkiewicz discussed how her department had been working on building a drone to apply the pesticide, spraying it using technology similar to most humidifiers. She mentioned that her team had been reaching out to local farmers in Monroe County to let them know that their team is building alternative devices that meet the needs of farmers on smaller farms.
“We heard from some smaller farms that they wouldn’t necessarily use a drone to cover their field. Some of the local farmers said they used backpack sprayers currently and they requested a hand-held sprayer,” Fietkiewicz said.
As Press Relations Manager, Ablin has been working to gain publicity for iGEM’s project, communicating with other stakeholders and the general public. She was in charge of creating and maintaining iGEM’s social media feed and communicating with different media outlets to spread the word.
“I’ll sit down with [newspapers] or I’ll write my own articles and then those get put into sites that get picked up by people. We’ve previously gotten interviews with different news sites. We published in all the newspapers for everybody’s home[town],” Ablin said. “A lot of it’s just, as of right now, making sure people know what our project is and people see it and they’re interested in it.”
While diving deeper into final routine testing of each sector of the project, the undergraduate researchers have been preparing for upcoming milestones of V.E.R.D.A.N.T. These milestones are WikiFreeze at the end of October, where they publish the finalized version of the website which describes the project itself and the team, and the competition all iGEM teams enter in November, called the iGEM Jamboree. Members, including Giauque, illustrated how recently, work has been stressful due to these important events along with students’ outside commitments.
“I think this is an incredibly high-stress time, not just for the project, but we had the first midterms coming up for our classes,” Giauque described. “The biggest thing going forward is just ensuring that our mental health is proper. We are naturally giving effort to the project and all its different facets.”
Despite the stress of wrapping up the final phases of the project and preparing for the competition, he and DeMayo acknowledged that the challenges of working in iGEM have been worthwhile. DeMayo emphasized that team members have the opportunity to bond with each other as they work together and look back at their accomplishments.
“Beyond the science aspect of [iGEM], we have a very fun, collaborative, outgoing team. We’ve had a lot of social events with everyone … Having that social connection with everybody, making new friends and expanding my broader connections at [URochester] has been really impactful,” DeMayo reflected. “Dr. Meyer once said to us that iGEM is a very challenging experience, but it’s worthwhile. So, I hope that we can all just take a step up and look at the big picture and see what we’ve accomplished over the past year.”
iGEM’s V.E.R.D.A.N.T. team will continue to work hard on completing the project in the lab and prepare for the iGEM Jamboree this November. iGEM has allowed this group of undergraduate students to pursue this unique venture by applying their knowledge of different STEM fields in innovative projects that could change the fields of STEM and the broader world.
“It’s not like any other lab experience you’d get at [URochester],” DeMayo said. “You are in charge of your own experiments. And if you’re interested in any kind of biology, especially genetics or synthetic biology, it’s a great experience.”
