Budding artists make city proud

Bangalore has been made proud at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A group of students from Shristi School for Arts, Design and Technology, Bangalore, won the best presentation award at the sixth International Genetic Engineering Machines (iGEM) conference held at MIT.

The ten art students, showcased rare convergence between science and art as they developed a bacteria. Their presentation on the construction of the bacteria won them the accolades.

The students, under the guidance of Mukund Tattai and Navneet Rai of National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), developed the bacteria using a synthesised geosmin, an organic compound that is responsible for the emotive smell of freshly ploughed earth, or of the fragrance that first monsoon rains bring from the earth.

“We began work on the project in June this year. We came up with hundreds of ideas; finally we decided on geosmin bacteria because it influences the human emotions with the smell of the earth from the rains. It was a poetic idea for us,” Yashas Shetty, a faculty member at Shrishti and the mentor of the team, said. “We took pieces of DNA and injected it into a workhorse bacterium called E. coli. Then we expressed the enzyme that produced the smell called geosmin.”

The team documented the journey of their discovery in the form of a video presentation.    “The students also learnt the language and techniques of life sciences and explored its cultural, ethical, and aesthetic implications. It was an interesting mix of work,” Shetty said.
The Bangalore team competed against 112 undergraduate teams from 25 countries at the iGEM conference and came up trumps in the presentation category. India was represented by multiple teams at the conference—IIT Bombay’s engineered bacterial feedback controllers, IIT-Madras designed a living lock-and-key device, and IBB Pune designed cells based on game theory.