Usually when Cochranites talk about a jamboree, they’re referring to a toe-tapping country music good time – this time the buzz is surrounding a different kind of event.
Cochrane High School’s CoBRA iGEM team recently returned home with a top prize from the iGEM Jamboree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, Mass., held June 28. The team of 15 students won for best presentation for a project the bio-research group had been working on that deals with the problem of the mountain pine beetle.
CoBRA stands for Cochrane Bio-Researchers in Action and iGEM for International Genetically Engineered Machine.
The Jamboree hosted 54 high school teams from around the world with their own projects, including teams from North America, Europe and Asia.
CoBRA member Adam Sibbald said the experience of going to the jamboree was incredible.
“To get to see what all of these other teams are doing and all of their ideas and just the variation between projects is really incredible to see,” said Sibbald. “Just because you did it one way doesn’t mean it is the right way for everybody.”
Sibbald said the team chose the mountain pine beetle because it had the potential to negatively affect Cochrane and the local businesses here.
He said he thinks this is the reason they received so much local support and sponsorship.
It is estimated the mountain pine beetle has killed around 723 million cubic meters of timber since the current infestation started around 2001, according to the BC Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.
According to the Government of Alberta, the province has six million hectares of forest at risk, and if the pine beetle is not managed while the populations are low, it could result in severe damages.
As Sibbald explained, the mountain pine beetle carries fungal spores and when it burrows into a tree it releases these spores and this fungus grows and stops the flow of nutrients to the tree.
The fungus turns the natural defenses that the tree secretes into a food source for the fungus itself.
“It is basically a death sentence once the fungus gets in there and because the winters aren’t cold enough to kill off the fungus or the beetle, it’s running out of control,” said Sibbald.
He said their project was trying to restore a balance by creating bacteria that would break down the fungus so the tree could take care of the beetle, but wouldn’t take the beetle to the point of extinction.
“We’re not changing anything completely in the ecosystem. We’re just trying to put a Band-Aid on it and let the eco-system heal itself. When we take this Band-Aid off, it will be able to function like it did itself so many years before this became an issue,” he said.
Sibbald graduated from Cochrane High this year and will be heading to the University of British Columbia in the fall. He said he would continue to work on the project with team members during the summer breaks, saying he would like to “see it through.”
