iGEM

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is an undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. The goal of competition is to prepare standard biological parts of DNA and assemble them in a new inventive way into working biological system.

iGEM began in January of 2003 with a month-long course at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston).

This course grew to a summer competition with 5 teams in 2004, 13 teams in 2005 - the first year that the competition grew internationally, 32 teams in 2006, 54 teams in 2007 and 84 teams in 2008. Projects ranged from banana and wintergreen smelling bacteria to an arsenic biosensor.

In year 2006 Slovenian team has participated for the first time in iGEM competition under mentorship of prof. dr. Roman Jerala, working in Department of Biotechnology at the National Institute of Chemistry. After five months of working in a lab, developing an idea how to stop sepsis, group of students successfully presented their work at MIT and won the grand prize.

Encouraged with a great success of the first team, new Slovenian student teams attended iGEM competition again in the years 2007 and 2008. In the year 2007 they won the gold medal and were first in Health and Medicine area, with project Virotrap, where a new approach for defending HIV infection was shown. In the year 2008 Slovenia team won the grand prize for the second time. They prepared high-tech vaccine against Helicobacter pylori, the main causative agent for development of stomach cancer.