iGEM never sleeps

It's like a dorm party... but not. It's getting close to 9, the techno is blasting, a leftover spread of Mediterranean food goes dry on a long table, and hundreds of undergrads stand around talking in groups. Many of them are still standing by their posters -- their last chance to show off their work before the judges choose the winners tomorrow morning. The linkurl:team;http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Ljubljana from last year's winning institution, the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, described three ways to activate defense systems against HIV infection. All are insensitive to viral mutation, thereby beating the problem of drug resistance. The idea, the group said, is to target a function of the virus, rather than a sequence. The three techniques all rest on the dimerization of two cell membrane receptors, CD4 and CCR5, which occurs when the virus binds to the membrane. In one case, they rigged the two receptors to...