Team:KULeuven

Synthetic biology is a new challenge in biosciences. It combines biology and engineering principles to design and build new biological functions and systems. Examples are abound: cancer cell invading bacteria, microbes that take pictures, antimalarial drug producers,... The advantage of using living systems for these purposes is that, once they are designed and built, they are self-reproducible. The challenge, however, lies exactly within the design and construction: making biological circuits and devices as robust and predictive as their electrical counterparts. ...

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The international Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) or iGEM competition is a synthetic biology competition for multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate students. It was first organized in 2004 by Drew Endy, Randy Rettberg and Tom Knight of MIT with two goals in mind: to yield new ideas in synthetic biology and to form the future researchers in this new scientific community. Whereas 5 US teams competed in 2004, the 2007 edition already had 750 students and advisors grouped in 54 teams from 19 countries. This year, the competition already counts 83 teams!

The core of the iGEM competition is to design and build a “new genetic machine” with BioBricks. BioBricks are standardized, off the shelf biological parts that are used by genetic network designers. All BioBricks that were made during previous iGEM competitions are registered and documented in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Each iGEM competition thus starts from the efforts of the previous years.

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• More on our team

The University of Leuven was founded almost six hundred years ago. Throughout the centuries people have always occupied center stage at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. The University's academic fame has attracted scholars and scientists as Justus Lipsius, Gerard Mercator and Andreas Vesalius who have all made valuable contribution to the European intellectual life. The University of Leuven can look back on a glorious past, but it also moves with the times. The University's educational concept is modern, with research activities focused on the needs and aspirations of contemporary people and society. The University of Leuven is famous not just within the borders of Belgium, but far beyond as well. Being a very lively city of and for students, Leuven aspires to maintain that reputation. In contrast to most university cities, Leuven does not have a closed campus. The University buildings are spread throughout the city and were originally built for completely different purposes.

The KULeuven team consists of 12 enthusiastic students selected out of three faculties, 4 civil engineers, 4 bio-engineers and 4 biochemists. More information on the team members can be found on the Students page or by scrolling over the heads of the students.

Maarten Breckpot

Maarten Breckpot

Studies:
1st Master of Applied Sciences and Engineering – Mathematical Engineering
Country:
Belgium

Nick Van Damme

Nick Van Damme

Studies:
1st Master of Applied Sciences and Engineering – Mathematical Engineering
Country:
Belgium

Benjamien Moeyaert

Benjamien Moeyaert

Studies:
3rd Bachelor of Biochemistry and Biotechnology
Country:
Belgium

Stefanie Roberfroid

Stefanie Roberfroid

Studies:
3rd Bachelor of Bioscience Engineering – Biomolecular Engineering
Country:
Belgium

Dries Vercruysse

Dries Vercruysse

Studies:
1st Master of Applied Sciences and Engineering - Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Country:
Belgium

Andim Doldurucu

Andim Doldurucu

Studies:
1st Master of Bioscience Engineering – Nanoscience and Nanotechnology
Country:
Turkey

Hanne Tytgat

Hanne Tytgat

Studies:
3rd Bachelor of Biochemistry and Biotechnology
Country:
Belgium

Elke Van Assche

Elke Van Assche

Studies:
3rd Bachelor of Bioscience Engineering – Biomolecular Engineering
Country:
Belgium

Jan Mertens

Jan Mertens

Studies:
1st Master of Bioscience Engineering – Biomolecular Engineering
Country:
Belgium

Nathalie Busschaert

Nathalie Busschaert

Studies:
3rd Bachelor of Chemistry
Country:
Belgium

Jonas Demeulemeester

Jonas Demeulemeester

Studies:
1st Master of Biochemistry and Biotechnology
Country:
Belgium

Antoine Vandermeersch

Antoine Vandermeersch

Studies:
2nd and 3rd Bachelor of Applied Sciences and Engineering – Electrical and Materials Engineering
Country:
Belgium

Our team’s project is Dr. Coli, an E. coli bacterium that produces a drug when and where it is needed in the human body. It does this in an intelligent way, such that the drug production meets the individual patient’s needs. And when the patient is cured, Dr. Coli eliminates itself from the body. To achieve this goal we divided our project into several subsystems. A detailed description about every subsystem can be found by clicking on one of the following pictograms.

scroll over the pictograms to get a short description or click on them to go to the corresponding page

The most important assets of our project are the different control mechanisms. Since these are very much dependent on kinetic and other constants, Dr. Coli heavily relies on proper modeling. Our Dry-Lab team has spent its summer setting up a computational model of Dr. Coli to completely simulate his actions. We constructed models of all the subsystems (components) in both CellDesigner and Matlab. All these subsystems have been characterised by their ODE's and have been simulated thoroughly. Together they form our full model of Dr. Coli. These models are only capable of simulating the behaviour of one Dr. Coli cell, so we implemented our own Software Tool that can work with multi cellular models.

After building the model frame, it was time to add the physical relevance to it. Kinetic constants were searched for and investigated by means of previous iGEM teams (e.g. ETHZ 2007), the parts characterizations on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts and popular biological literature databases such as Hubmed, ... Our own contribution would revolve around data analysis of the produced parts.

Working with concepts as modularity and abstraction, we worked out every subsystem (Output, Memory, Filter, ...) to eventually merge them all in our full model. By trial and error the system was adapted to achieve desired output quantities (amount of molecules, proteins, ...) given a representative input.

To take it a step further, a multi-cell model was build, to analyse crucial steps in cell division (e.g. Memory inheritance). A diffusion model was made to investigate HSL diffusion towards neighbouring cells and see what effects this generated on their Invertimer system.