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Concept
International Genetically Engineered Machine
Summary
The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition is a worldwide synthetic biology competition that was initially aimed at undergraduate university students, but has since expanded to include divisions for high school students, entrepreneurs, and community laboratories, as well as 'overgraduates'.
Student teams are given a kit (so called ‘Distribution Kit’) of standard, interchangeable parts (so called 'BioBricks') at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts comprising various genetic components such as promoters, terminators, reporter elements, and plasmid backbones. Working at their local laboratories over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.
The teams are free to choose a project, which can build on previous projects or be new to iGEM. Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression.
At the end of the summer, the teams add their new BioBricks to the Parts Registry and the scientific community can build upon the expanded set of BioBricks in the next year.
At the annual ‘iGEM Jamboree’ teams from all continents meet in Paris for a scientific conference where they present their projects to each other and to a scientific jury of ~120 judges. The judges are awarding medals, special prizes to the teams and select a ‘Grand Prize Winner’ team as well as ‘Runner-Up’ teams in each division (High School, Undergraduate and Overgraduate).
Each participant receives a participating certificate (see fig. below) and has the possibility to earn medals (bronze, silver and gold; see fig. below) with their team depending on different criteria that the team fulfilled in the competitions. For a bronze medal it is for example necessary to submit a new part to the Parts Registry, for a silver medal the team is required to document the functionality of a part and for a gold medal it is finally, among other criteria, necessary to obtain a proof-of-principle for the team's project.
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