Team:UCSF/Background

Biotechnology Program and Abraham Lincoln High School (ALHS)

The ALHS Biotechnology Program is a two year pathway developed by George Cachianes and co-taught by Julie Reis: Lincoln High Biotech Webpage

The curriculum during the program can be broken down as follows

First Year: Introduction to biotechnology, DNA cloning, and the industry and career opportunities

Second Year: Students study and perform several lab protocols including running polyacrylamide and agarose gels, western blots, DNA minipreps, column chromatography, etc.

This year 5 members of the UCSF iGEM team were chosen from students that have completed this 2 year class. Read more about Nate, Helena, Louis, Verna, and Kendall at the team members page!

This summer our team was joined by Yesenia Lopez, who currently attends City College of San Francisco and was a previous participant in the Gladstone Scholars Program.

Peking University and UCSF iGEM Exchange

We initiated an exchange program wherein UCSF funds a trip for a student to do research at a lab at Peking University for one summer, and Peking University sends a student to UCSF for the same purpose. This summer of 2012, we had a student from Peking University named Jingyi Xi help us with our modeling portion of our project. We also sent a former UCSF iGem member, Tina Chen, to Peking University to participate on their iGEM team.

Motivation for the UCSF iGEM 2012 Project

Our motivation for this year’s project was based around being able to engineer/modify organisms so that they could exist in symbiosis and work together to produce a compound. Being able to do this would, hypothetically, allow a decrease in metabolic burden towards a single compound-producing organism, eliminate the need for negative feedback, and enable modular pathways to be possible. If a successful method for doing this was discovered, it would for example, revolutionize the way industry produces expensive drugs and molecular products.