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The International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) is an annual competition
teaches mostly undergraduate teams of students how to apply the
principles of synthetic biology to design and execute a project
over the course of a summer. Student teams are first given a kit
of standardized biological parts. Working at their own schools,
they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build
biological systems and operate them in living cells. Here are some
iGEM program features:
• iGEM holds a Teacher Workshop before the start of the summer
to help team leaders help their teams succeed and instruct them
on how best to educate and train undergraduate researchers. In 2007,
iGEM held three separate Teacher Workshops, one each in Boston (MIT),
China, and Zurich.
• iGEM has a strong emphasis on building the synthetic biology
community, especially through online tools and resources. The iGEM
website provides a location for teams to put their project descriptions,
protocols, notebooks, and much more. iGEM also has a strong relationship
with OpenWetWare.org, which provides an online community forum for
sharing lab protocols, curriculum and teaching resources, and technical
data across the broader synthetic biology community.
• Over the course of the summer, iGEM teams add their new
biological parts to the online Registry of Standard Biological Parts.
In doing so, they increase the number of parts that next year’s
students can choose from, while increasing the broader research
community’s open-source resources.
• At the end of the summer, iGEM teams from around the world
gather at MIT for the iGEM Jamboree, where the teams present the
results of their work, interact with other research teams from around
the world, and have a chance to win prizes.
The iGEM experience provides students with a rare opportunity to
participate in a bioengineering project "from cradle to grave."
This is a formative, career-shaping experience for many young scientists.
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