Synthetic sports: A bacterial relay race

Pennsylvania State University is well known for the breadth and depth of its athletic programs. But, until last year, the Penn State Athletic Department had focused on tuition-paying and scholarship-funded eukaryotes, while bacteria had languished in neglect. To reconcile this apparent inequity, we designed a bacterial relay race. We eventually hope to have a multi-leg relay race with laps, but for the initial iGEM competition the project was simplified to a 'hand-off' where a group of motile bacteria would encounter an immotile group, transferring a signal to turn on the latter's motility.