At Lambert High School in suburban Atlanta, students are genetic engineers, manipulating the building blocks of life. Their iGEM team is developing a way to detect and treat Lyme disease using CRISPR gene editing. “It's a novel way of CRISPR that detects, and so we have to create a guide RNA, and when that guide RNA is recognized, the protein gets activated, and it collaterally cleaves or cuts everything around it,” says student Avani Karthik. “That just went right over my head,” says Bill Whitaker, who admits it’s light-years beyond his biology classes, where the high point was dissecting frogs. #syntheticbiology #crispr #biology #highschool