A student design team at the University of Waterloo is hard at work to build on its success at a major international event involving synthetic biology.
Members of Waterloo iGEM brought home a silver medal in the fall from the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, which featured more than 320 student teams from around the world.
Their project at the Giant Jamboree, as the contest is called by the non-profit organization that hosts it in Boston each year, involved the successful demonstration of a system to engineer bacteria to grow in response to green light.
The team’s project for 2019 is focused on bacteria that fix nitrogen for legume crops. By engineering those bacteria, members hope to enable them to withstand the harmful effects of pesticides and reduce the need for environmentally unfriendly nitrogen fertilizers.