Evry-Courcouronnes, 4 November 2024 – The University of Évry-Paris Saclay and Genopole are proud to announce the success of their team at the 2024 edition of iGEM, a world-renowned international competition for synthetic biology. This year’s team was composed of 13 university bachelor & master degree and engineering school students, supervised by 2 PhD students and headed by Associate Professor Ioana Popescu, who has guided iGEM teams since 2017. They competed in the “Foundational Advance” category (or “village” in iGEM parlance).
Their 2024 project involved the directed evolution of proteins, a technology aimed at optimizing genetic mutations to improve the effectiveness of resulting proteins for a given task. By employing two complementary methods, the team combined both random and targeted mutation techniques to select pertinent mutations and eliminate deleterious ones. Their proof-of-concept protein, the XylS transcription factor, can detect certain benzoic acids resulting from hydrocarbon degradation. The team’s at-term objective is to create XylS mutants able to detect other compounds, notably those resulting from plastics degradation, with an aim to developing enzymes able to break them down.
“The team has been working on the project since last January and this is a unique opportunity for the students to deploy their competencies acquired during their studies in an international setting,” underlines Ioana Popescu, teaching researcher at the University of Évry-Paris Saclay. “We seek to develop innovative technologies while increasing the visibility of the university for the synthetic biology field. We plan to publish our work if its results continue to be promising. The objective is always to have a concrete scientific impact and allow the students to participate in advanceable research.”
The Genopole Évry Paris-Saclay teams have won many distinctions over the years, including gold medals every year since 2017 and the Best Hardware prize in 2023. The 2024 team competed in the “Model”, “Software Tool,” and “Part Collection” categories, in coherence with its advances in the current project.
Jury’s Favorite” prize at the D4Gen Hackathon
An earlier form of what would become the PHAGEVO project had already won a “Coup de cœur” prize at Genopole’s D4Gen Hackathon organisé par Genopole held in March. Through that event, the project was able to benefit from the support of bioinformaticians who enabled the artificial intelligence for mutation predictions. The Wet Lab team tested the AI’s predictions in the lab, in parallel with the directed evolution experiments. These partnerships have already produced promising results that the team hopes will lead to scientific publication in the future.
