'07 Paly graduate finalist at MIT biotechnology competition iGEM

posted December 17, 2007

by Amy Stringer of Campanile

Courtesy of Eric Meltzer

Paly graduate Eric Meltzer (left) recently helped UCSF make the finals at a global biotechnology competition by making an artificial organelle.

Recently, at the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition, a biotechnology competition also known as iGEM, 2007 Palo Alto High School graduate Eric Meltzer was a member of a team that reached the finals.

The team successfully created an artificial organelle.

iGEM is mostly comprised of undergraduate students completing biotechnology research under faculty advisers. However, the University of California at San Francisco offers only post-graduate programs.

So, UCSF Professor Wendell Lim recruited high school students from surrounding Bay Area high schools to be a part of his synthetic biology team.

The team provided the students with lab experience that most college undergraduates do not obtain until their junior or senior years in college.

The contest was founded by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The competition focuses on engineering parts that can be put together to create new biological structures with the use of proteins and other molecules created by cells under instructions from DNA. It explores the possibility of engineering biological systems through synthetic biology.

"Every year the DNA sequences are saved for the next competition so that a library of standardized parts can slowly be constructed," Meltzer said.

Meltzer became a part of the UCSF team after applying for the position.

The UCSF team, which Meltzer was on, had two projects that focused on the spatial organization of protein complexes in the cell. One of the projects dealt with recruiting negative effectors to a protein scaffold. As a member of the team, he did computer modeling for the team's various experiments and also participated in laboratory experiments.

The other project focused on creating a synthetic organelle, a membrane-bound compartment inside which many reactions can potentially take place. The group called the produced artificial organelle the "synthesome."

Meltzer's team made it to the finals, scoring higher than Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Caltech, the University of Cambridge in England and over three dozen other universities.

According to Meltzer, however, the competition aspect was only a small portion of the project itself.

From here Meltzer plans to continue synthetic biology research at Peking University during the summer.

"It was an incredible way to spend a summer, and I had a really good time," Meltzer said. "The people I worked with are just really great, not just smart but also into helping the students pick things up. I learned a lot of lab technique and also theoretical stuff, but more than that, I learned what it's really like to work in a lab."