After eight months of hard work, Michigan's Synthetic Biology team with advisor Marcus Ammerlaan has earned gold at the iGEM Americas East Regional and has moved onto the World Championship.

The Michigan's Synthetic Biology team is a group of undergraduates from CoE and LSA who have planned and carried out a research project under the auspices of the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) Foundation. During October 13th and 14th the team traveled to Pittsburgh to present their results and compete against 42 other teams in the Americas East division.

Team Michigan is engineering a novel, tightly controlled and inducible protein expression system in Escherichia coli in order to demonstrate that created robust boolean genetic control circuits that do not continuously rely on the presence of signaling compounds. Team Michigan is using two unidirectional recombinases found in pathogenic Escherichia coli, HbiF and FimE, to manipulate promoter orientation.

At the Americas East Regional, the team was awarded a gold medal, the award for "Best New BioBrick Part, Natural", and advanced to the World Championship in Cambridge, MA, which will be held November 2-4. This is the first time U-M has earned gold (U-M has previously won four bronzes) and the first time since the regional preliminaries were established that the team has advanced to the Finals.

Congratulations to Michigan's Synthetic Biology Team!!