Project Light-Bright: Lighting Up Cancer Detection Using Open-Source Biology

• This event is a production of the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
• The 2015 Science Cafe series celebrates the International Year of Light (http://www.light2015.org/Home.html).
• The Science Cafe is free with admission to the Garden.
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• Consult this page for more visitor information (http://atlantabotanicalgarden.org/plan-your-visit/visitor-info).
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Project Light-Bright: Lighting Up Cancer Detection Using Open-Source Biology

Ryan Randall, Researcher
Georgia Institute of Technology

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As a researcher at Georgia Tech, Ryan Randall focuses on benchmarking evolutionary methods in order to better understand how life adapts. In this pursuit, she has a developed an approach for generating a variety of diverse fluorescent protein colors through the evolution of a single red fluorescent protein gene. This research has since blossomed into a multitude of opportunities.

For the past four years, Ryan has extended her research into the classrooms of local Atlanta Area K-12 schools whereby students learn how to engineer fluorescent proteins and apply this to various research hypotheses.

In another extension, the project Light-Bright Crowdsourcing series was launched to publicly introduce and offer a novel set of proteins to the biotechnology and medical communities. These proteins offer an open-source alternative to intellectual property hoarded by large biotechnology companies, and thus lift the barriers for their use in the development of early-stage cancer detection tools.

Please consider supporting their open-source effort by visiting their page on the Georgia Tech Starter (https://starter.gatech.edu/) website.