Support Undergraduate Research in Synthetic Biology!

Help send the UO iGEM team to Paris to share their project on the world stage and support research that has a potential life-saving impact!

Project Motivations

The UOregon iGEM 2025 team is a group of young and motivated scientists who have set out to make a difference for those who suffer from mast cell activation disorders (MCAD). We are based out of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, a city often referred to as the “allergy capital of the world”. This is because of the extremely high concentration of grass pollen in the air. Our project emerges from a place of great need, and from a city whose air especially threatens the health of individuals with mast cell disorders.

Patients with MCAD often suffer in silence due to the invisibility of the disorder. Symptoms can be disguised under the umbrella of general allergies, with symptoms such as hives and wheezing. Symptoms can also be more severe, causing cardiovascular disturbances like rapid heart rate and fainting, or gastrointestinal issues like abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting. Severe MCAD episodes can consist of anaphylaxis and even death. While facing unpredictable triggers and reactions, patients with MCAD are in need of more specialized medical interventions.

Knowledgeable providers, access to reliable diagnostic tools, and the lack of patient-specific therapeutic options all stand in the way of adequate care for MCAD patients. MCAD is often missed in clinical settings, with the median time from symptom onset to diagnosis being 30 years. 

Mast cells, which are primary protectors of the body, overreact in response to normal triggers in patients with MCAD. Our solution provides a new way to stabilize mast cells in the gut, where an estimated 50% or more of the body’s mast cells are located. But beyond engineering a practical solution, we hope to engage with local and global communities to raise awareness for this devastating condition that impacts millions. With your help, we can get closer to making this dream a reality. 

iGEM Conference Travel Opportunity

The Paris Jamboree is a scientific conference where iGEM teams from around the world collaborate to advance the field of synthetic biology and network with big industry players. This year, there will be more than 5000 attendees, representing 400+ teams from 66 countries. Attending the conference will allow us to present our work on the world stage, putting the University of Oregon on the map. Our research will be shown to students from the top universities in the world, as well as leading companies in the synthetic biology industry. We can join startup incubator programs to turn our proof of concept prototype into a fully fledged therapeutic, and participate in the scientific process with other iGEM teams from the rest of the world.

Attending this conference will benefit more than our students' personal development. This Jamboree will expose our members to industry and technology that is only accessible to them during this conference. Our students are ambassadors of the University of Oregon, and this opportunity allows them to share their journey on an international stage. The Jamboree in Paris gives undergraduate students a chance to see high-level synthetic biology that would otherwise have a barrier to entry.

Travel costs $3,400 per student, and we can only afford to send two of our fifteen team members with our current funds. Sending more students means that the people who worked on specific aspects of the project can explain their work and answer any questions that may come up at the conference based on their expert knowledge, helping us put our best foot forward. A convincing presentation can open our project to support from startup incubators and launch our research into the commercialization and mass production stage.

Wet Lab Experimentation 

To execute our goal of reducing gastrointestinal symptoms related to mast cell activation disorders, we have designed a novel probiotic platform to secrete therapeutic aptamers in the gut. Aptamers are single-stranded chains of nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) that fold into hairpin-like structures, and they can bind to proteins with high specificity. Aptamers have been designed to bind to proteins involved in mast cell inflammatory pathways, inhibiting their function and reducing symptoms of inflammation. However, aptamers have yet to be expressed in vivo for therapeutic applications in the gut. 

Synthesizing aptamers in-vivo opens the door to further engineering of aptamer expression and secretion in response to physiologically relevant environmental queues or biomarkers. We intend to harness the power of retrons, naturally ocurring complexes of single stranded RNA and DNA, to stabilize the synthesis of single stranded DNA aptamers inside of bacteria. Alongside expressing aptamers in probiotic bacteria, future applications of this technology include tagging intracellular structures for visualization or therapeutic action, genomic engineering, and bacterial defense against viruses. 

Experimentation for this project will cost around $2,300 to support the synthesis of DNA constructs, highly specific proteins, bacterial transformation, reagents, and laboratory consumables necessary to build and test our initial retron design. We have four engineering goals, which we will make improvements to over the course of multiple design iterations:

1. Engineer E.coli Nissle-1917 to express a HinA transport protein, allowing histamine to enter our bacteria and serve as an environmental trigger for gene expression.

2. Engineer a lysis gene controlled by histamine using a histamine riboswitch. This part will mediate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level, so our cells lyse and release therapeutic aptamers in the presence of high histamine concentrations.

3. Design a circuit that constitutively expresses retrons and allows for proper folding of a single-stranded therapeutic aptamer sequence in vivo.

4. Express the extracellular domain of a mast cell protein of interest (MRGPRX 2) in E.coli to test the function of our synthesized aptamers.