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 UW iGEM team with their trophy, the "BioBrick". Photo credit David Appleyard The 2011 UW iGEM team was awarded the top prize at the iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machines competition) World Championship Jamboree, held at on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA on November 5-7. This follows their first place finish in the Americas Regional iGEM Jamboree in early October, and marks the first time a US team has ever won the international competition. More than 160 teams from around the world participated in the regional competitions, with the top 20 from each region going on to the World Championship. The UW team, which comprised more than 20 undergraduates from a broad range of science disciplines, also tied for Best Poster and Best Food or Energy Project. Three UW projects featured in the competition were bacteria designed to produce diesel fuel from sugars, a pill that can break down gluten in the digestive tract and bacterial magnets. Recent Biochemistry/BMSD graduate Justin Siegel led the team, with a group of other graduate students and postdocs, among them Aaron Chevalier, Jeremy Mills and Matt Smith of the Baker lab, serving as leaders for specific components of the project. Faculty advisers for the team were David Baker, Eric Klavins of Electrical Engineering, and Herbert Sauro of Bioengineering.  Team leaders  iGEM Faculty Advisors Team leader Justin Siegel writes “the University of Washington now officially has the best undergraduate synthetic biology team in the world.” For more about Justin and his work with UW iGEM students, see this earlier post. Check out the UW Today article on the UW iGEM team’s big win.  Dana Miler Assistant Professor of Biochemistry Dana Miller has won an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging award for 2011. The New Scholar awards provide four years of support for especially promising newly independent investigators, as they establish their laboratories and embark on their careers. Miller will use her Ellison award to study the effects of adaptation to hydrogen sulfide on protein homeostasis and lifespan. BMSD Graduate student Justin Siegel, who works jointly with David Baker (Biochemistry) and Michael Gelb (Chemistry, adjunct in Biochemistry), has received the prestigious 2011 Weintraub Award for computational design of an enzyme catalyst for a stereoselective bimolecular Diels-Alder reaction [Siegel et al. (2010) Science 329, 309-313]. The award honors Harold Weintraub, a founding member of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Siegel is one of 12 graduate students to earn this national distinction this year, and will participate in a symposium at the Hutch on May 6 with the other 11 awardees. See the full story in the University Week.  Siegel with the 2010 UW iGEM students Siegel is not only a student and scientist, but a remarkable mentor who led groups of UW undergraduates in designing and carrying out a synthetic biology project for the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition. In both 2009 and 2010, his teams took home the gold medal. Last summer, his students were also awarded the prize for Best Health and Medicine Project in which they created an enzyme that shows potential for degrading anthrax spores. Read more in the UW Daily. In honor of his accomplishments as a mentor and leader of the iGEM teams, Siegel was nominated by his students, David Baker, and the Department of Biochemistry for the UW Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually to only two Teaching Assistants university wide. Siegel defended his thesis on “Computational Enzyme Design: Engineering Novel Enzymes and Carbon Fixation Pathways” to a packed audience of students and faculty on Wednesday, April 27. In a rare display of universal approbation, Siegel was applauded before as well as after his thesis talk. Update as of September 7, 2011: Recently, a Science writer surfing our department website discovered the brief blurb above on the Weintraub Award, and wrote a charming piece for Science Careers entitled “A Father-and-Son Journey Into Synthetic Biology.” Justin, it turns out, is mentoring his iGEM undergraduates just as his dad, also an accomplished scientist then working at Applied Biosystems, had mentored him as a teenager: early, gently, and with faith in his creativity. Indeed, the iGEM projects — and his future research plans — are natural continuations of his dad’s fascination with rational enzyme design beginning as a graduate student in Physical Chemistry in the early 1970s. Still the generous parent and mentor, Science quotes Brock Siegel as saying “He’s now the teacher and we enjoy being colleagues.”  The Centenary Medal Professor David Baker has been named the 2012 Centenary Award winner by The Biochemical Society. The award was created to celebrate the Society’s first 100 years, which is marked this year, in 2011. Recipients are selected from biochemists around the world in recognition of achievement and excellence in the field. As the 2012 recipient, Baker will give the Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins Memorial Lecture at a Society conference next year.
The interface between physical and biological sciences is rapidly opening new frontiers in biomedical research. To advance this fertile research area in a highly effective manner, the University of Washington has established the inter-departmental Sackler Program in Integrative Biophysics to support postdoctoral fellows in cross-disciplinary research. The first round of applications will be considered starting November [...] New work from the the groups of UW Biochem professors Bill Schief and David Baker represents progress on the long and difficult road to an effective HIV vaccine. HIV is a small and stealthy pathogen that constantly varies the protein molecules that stud its surface. This variability means that for the human immune system, the virus [...] The UW Biochemistry laboratories of Tamir Gonen and Wim Hol in a joint study report a cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM) analysis of the Vibrio cholerae secretin GspD, which secretes the cholera toxin. [...] Using emerging solid-state NMR approaches combined with small angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and solution-state NMR, the groups of Rachel Klevit (UW Biochemistry) and Hartmut Oshkinat (Leibniz-Institut Für Molekulare Pharmakologie, Berlin) groups have cracked the mystery of aB structure. [...] |
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