By Abby Cohn and Megan Mansell Williams

Despite its association with food poisoning, Escherichia coli can actually do good. A team of UC Berkeley undergraduates used the bacteria to demonstrate that a cheap, safe blood substitute can be made from humble beginnings.  

Called “Bactoblood,” the substance was designed in just three months as an entry for the annual International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, MIT’s prestigious synthetic biology contest. Clutching bags of their red liquid, Berkeley’s crew won a slot as one of six finalists in a field of 54 undergraduate teams from 19 countries. Peking University took the grand prize for constructing a self-differentiated bacterial assembly line.

“Bactoblood sounds crazier than it is,” says project adviser John Dueber, a postdoc at UC Berkeley’s California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. The brainchild of chemical biology senior Austin Day, Bactoblood was concocted by a half-dozen talented undergraduates from bioengineering, biochemistry and anthropology, plus three high school students and graduate and faculty advisers. Berkeley’s entry was different from the others, says team member and bioengineering junior David Tulga.  

“Our project is really a complete system,” Tulga says. “Think of it as a computer. A lot of people at iGEM are building components, like a keyboard or a hard drive. We were trying to build the whole computer.”

The students genetically modified E. coli to detoxify it and help it live longer in the bloodstream. They engineered a genetic “self-kill” switch that destroyed the bacteria’s DNA to ensure it wouldn’t reproduce unchecked, then inserted the genes responsible for producing hemoglobin, the red blood cell protein that carries oxygen. They also modified the microbes to withstand freeze-drying, lengthening the product’s shelf-life. 

“Bactoblood is universally compatible, disease free and inexpensive, and you can reproduce it like crazy,” says bioengineering junior and team member Samantha Liang. “I thought it was a really great idea.”

Go to http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Berkeley_UC for more.