Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
An 11-member team of Wright State University students earned a high honor in a worldwide synthetic biology research project competition held in Paris in October.
Their project? How to detect dangerous manganese in drinking water and soil. Their competition? About 6,500 students competing across 45 countries in 346 other teams. Their high honor? A silver medal.
They are Wright State’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) team, part of Biotechnology Outreach Bolstered through Education in STEM and Development, or BioBESTD, a Defense Department program to develop a national workforce in biotechnology.
Scientists from Wright State’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Air Force Research Laboratory mentored the team.
“We’ve been working on this since February 2022,” said Jaidan Peters, a senior majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology from New Carlisle. “It was an almost yearlong effort, to do the preliminary research, collect data — this has been our baby. To see our hard work come back to us in the form of a silver medal, we’re all excited and proud of what we’ve done.”
