An inter-disciplinary team of NUS students, including six from CDE departments, won third place in the prestigious international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition for their project named OTTER – an AI-powered platform that predicts the interactions of RNA molecules within cells.
The competition, which was held in Paris on 3 November 2023, is an annual global event focused on global synthetic biology attended by more than 6,000 participants and featured 167 undergraduate teams from top universities worldwide.
Consisting of students from various NUS faculties including Design and Engineering, School of Computing, Faculty of Science, and Duke-NUS Medical School, the team of nine students came out as the as the best-performing team from Asia.
They were also awarded the 'Best Foundational Advance' prize and the Gold Medal Award in the competition, as well as earning nominations for additional accolades, including Best Wiki, Best New Composite Part, Best Presentation, and Best Model.
OTTER, which stands for Optimised Technique for swiTch Engineering and Ranking, capitalises on recent breakthroughs in RNA vaccines and machine learning technologies. It assesses the efficacy of different RNA classes, such as RNA switches, and identifies RNA sequences with enhanced precision for deactivating specific genes.
The interdisciplinary nature of the project required collaboration among students with diverse skill sets in coding and wet lab experiments. Over the year-long course of the project, the team conducted interviews with experts, sharpened their presentation skills by addressing both university students and kindergarten students on genetic engineering, and integrated their findings into a comprehensive project.
"This is a showcase of our world-class multi-disciplinary education and research," said Associate Professor Poh Chueh Loo from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at CDE and the Lead PI for the project.
“The students have worked very hard the whole year, and their work has impressed the judges. The students have competed with the best in the world and have done us very proud."
Associate Professor Jimmy Chih from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at CDE mentored the team, with support from scientists at SynCTI, including Associate Professor Matthew Chang, Associate Professor Yew Wen Shan, and Assistant Professor Julius Freden. The team also received support from BioMakerSpace@CDE and NUS iGEM alumni.
The team includes:
- Syarwina Ridwan (co-team lead) - Biomedical Engineering
- Chen Xiayu (co-team lead) - Biomedical Engineering
- Divyalakshmi Balasubramaniam - Biomedical Engineering
- Chai Chin Wei - Biomedical Engineering
- Totapally Sharmada - Biomedical Engineering
- Qifan Sun - Mechanical Engineering
- Ramu Lakshmanan - Computer Science
- Tang Si Ik Beatrix - Duke-NUS Medical School
- Chavelle Kok Kit Yan - Biological Sciences
