Glenbard East BioBuilder club breaks new ground

Posted May 13, 2017 11:00 pm

Peg Mannion, Glenbard District 87

The Glenbard East High School BioBuilder synthetic biology club has successfully engineered freeze-dried bacterial lysate (the liquid portion of the cell) to create the human leptin hormone. Students designed DNA constructs (both plasmid-based and linear), inserted the DNA into cell lysates and the lysates created a human hormone that is involved in appetite suppression. This series of experiments has never been attempted, and the students carried out the protocol flawlessly.

The BioBuilder club is mentored by scientists from MIT (Dr. Natalie Kuldell), Northwestern University (Jessica Stark) and Boston University (Marilene Pavan) and sponsored by Glenbard East teacher Tom Martinez. The students' work was carried out over the course of 8 months, and the effort by club members was terrific! Club members include Deemah Qaq, Palak Patel, Richa Patel, Mary Anderson, Tyler Zondor and Quinn Mucha.

This work will be published in the Synthetic Biology journal BioTreks.

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