More that 800 students participated in this year's International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition at MIT this year. Throughout the history of the iGEM competition, projects have been exclusively conceived, designed, and executed by the students.  As the competition has grown the success of the student projects has increased dramatically as has the intensity with which students devote themselves to their projects.  Whereas in the past it was most common to see projects presented at the design and modeling stage, we are now seeing more projects achieve the modeling, building, testing, and measuring stages of the teams’ goals.  In 2008, 63 teams (71%) reported that part of the project had been built; 47 teams (56%) reported that they had tested their systems; 38 teams (45%) reported that their system worked how they expected; 40 teams (48%) reported that they were able to measure part or all of their system. 

Projects range across many different topics including health and medical applications, biofuels and energy, bioremediation, environmental applications, manufacturing, and others. The advancements in the field of synthetic biology made by iGEM participants so far have been extremely promising.  We expect iGEM and its community will continue to grow and to contribute to shaping the field and all that are part of it, including SynBERC.  SynBERC is proud to provide financial, leadership, and assessment support to the organizers of iGEM and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts at MIT to expand the reach of this competition. more ->

About SynBERC
The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is a multi-institution research effort to lay the foundation for the emerging field of synthetic biology. SynBERC’s vision is to catalyze biology as an engineering discipline by developing the foundational understanding and technologies to allow researchers to design and build standardized, integrated biological systems to accomplish many particular tasks.
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