Friday, November 6th, 2009

Synthetic Biology Competition

courtesy IGEM

110 student teams gathered at MIT for the final round of this year's International Genetically Engineered Machine competition -- a competition in which high school students and undergraduate teams show off their skills at engineering biological machines. Under contest rules, each team is given a kit of 'biological parts' at the beginning of the summer, drawn from a catalog known as the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Over the summer, the student teams use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. We'll hear what this year's teams came up with.