A team of students from the Institute of Bio-informatics and Biotechnology of the University of Pune recently won the bronze medal at the International Synthetic Biology Competition held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

This is a prestigious research competition where undergraduate biotechnology students working on genetic engineering of DNA molecules to build useful and standard biological parts which can be used and applied further in medicine, agriculture, industry and environment.

The team that won in the category of information processing and new applications comprised Mandar Phatak, Swetha Srinivasan, Samit Watve, Chinar Patil, Amruta Oak, Sharvaru Sathe, Rahul Bhosale and professors B A Chopade and Praveen K Sahu.

Around 1,200 students had taken part in the contest. The team’s project dealt with construction of 26 novel genetic circuits called biobricks used for cell-cell signalling leading to demonstration of Turing machines (simplest computational model) in the biological system.

The work has long-term applications in the future development of bio-computers and in building numerous bio-computational devices of indefinite capacity having error-proof design using biological phenomena such as protein and nucleic acid based cell-cell signalling. The team has plans to apply for a US patent for their work.