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The iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition is a worldwide synthetic biology competition that was initially aimed at undergraduate and 'overgraduate' university students, but has since expanded to include divisions for high school students, entrepreneurs, and community laboratories. iGEM is presented as "the heart of synthetic biology" - educating the next generation of leaders and workforce of the field. Since its inception in 2003, over 80 000 students from over 65 countries have been trained in the responsible, safe and secure use of synthetic biology.
| iGEM | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Date(s) | October, 23 - 26 (2024) |
| Frequency | Annually |
| Venue | Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, France (2022~) Hynes Convention Center, Boston, United States (2014-2019) MIT, Boston, United States (2003-2013) |
| Location(s) | Paris, France (2022~) Boston, Massachusetts, United States (2003-2019) With additional events worldwide |
| Inaugurated | 2003 |
| Most recent | |
| iGEMers | Annually: 10 000+ participants, 400+ teams Since 2003: 80 000+ participants, 4500+ teams |
| Organised by | iGEM Foundation |
| Website | igem |
The iGEM Competition is a flagship program of the iGEM Foundation - an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of synthetic biology, education and competition, and the development of an open, collaborative, and cooperative community. Aside from the competition, iGEM has established many initiatives and programs to support the future growth of synthetic biology throughout the world: iGEM Community, iGEM Technology, iGEM Responsibility, iGEM Startups, and iGEM Leagues.
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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 expo event and conference where they present their projects to each other and to a scientific jury of ~400 judges. The judges award medals and 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).
Awards & Judging in the iGEM competition
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.
In 2016 as an example, 300 teams participated in the competition from which 37% received a gold medal, 25% a silver medal, 26% a bronze medal and 12% were not awarded a medal.
In each division, the best performance in a certain aspect of the competition is honored with special prizes. The special prizes include: 'Best Project' in the respective categories (app. 10 categories), 'Best Art & Design', 'Best Hardware', 'Best Measurement', 'Best Software', 'Best Human Practices', 'Best Model', 'Best New Part', 'Best Poster', 'Best Presentation', 'Best Wiki' and others depending on the competition year. Together with individual certificates, the teams are given glass trophies for each special prize (see fig. below).
From all teams in a respective division, a number of finalists are selected (1 to 6, depending on year and division) and allowed to present their project again in front of all Jamboree participants. From the presented projects all judges select the winner of this year's iGEM competition, the Grand Prize Winner team, who are then awarded a big metal Lego-brick (see fig. below). The winning team may keep this challenge trophy for a year until it gets awarded to the next 'Grand Prize Winner'. Participants of a 'Grand Prize Winner' team are also given challenge coins of the respective year (see fig. below).
Participant's certificate
Gold medal sticker
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| Year | No. of participants |
|---|---|
| 2004 | |
| 2005 | |
| 2006 | |
| 2007 | |
| 2008 | |
| 2009 | |
| 2010 | |
| 2011 | |
| 2012 | |
| 2013 | |
| 2014 | |
| 2015 | |
| 2016 | |
| 2017 | |
| 2018 | |
| 2019 | |
| 2020 | |
| 2021 | |
| 2022 | |
| 2023 | |
| 2024 |
iGEM developed out of student projects conducted during MIT's Independent Activities Periods in 2003 and 2004.[2][3] Later in 2004, a competition with five teams from various schools was held. In 2005, teams from outside the United States took part for the first time.[4] Since then iGEM has continued to grow, with 130 teams entering in 2010.[5] Randy Rettberg, an engineer who has worked for technology companies including Apple, Sun and BBN,[6] is the founder and president of iGEM.
Because of this increasing size, in the years 2011 - 2013 the competition was split into three regions: Europe, the Americas, and Asia (though teams from Africa and Australia also entered via "Europe" and "Asia" respectively).[7] Regional jamborees occurred during October; and some subset of teams attending those events were selected to advance to the World Championship at MIT in November.[8]
In January 2012 the iGEM Foundation was spun out of MIT as an independent non-profit organization located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The iGEM Foundation supports scientific research and education through operating the iGEM competition. The same year, iGEM expanded into having not only the Collegiate division, but also competitions for entrepreneurs and high school students.
For their tenth anniversary, iGEM added new tracks to the existing ones: Art & Design, Community Labs, Entrepreneurship, Measurement, Microfluidics, Policy & Practice, and Software. Although Entrepreneurship and Software were tracks in previous years, in 2014 they were made more distinct in terms of their judging requirements.[9] Furthermore, in 2014 iGEM did not have regional jamborees, but instead hosted a giant jamboree so every team could participate in one conference in Cambridge unlike in previous years where only the regional finalists were brought to Cambridge.[10]
The iGEM Jamborees for 2020 and 2021 were held online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Starting in 2022, the event was redesigned and rebranded to the iGEM Grand Jamboree, held in the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles.
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Beyond just building biological systems, broader goals of iGEM include:
- To enable the systematic engineering of biology.
- To promote the open and transparent development of tools for engineering biology.
- And to help construct a society that can productively and safely[11] apply biological technology.
iGEM's dual aspects of self-organization and imaginative manipulation of genetic material have demonstrated a new way to arouse student interest in modern biology and to develop their independent learning skills.
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Gold Medal
Silver Medal
Bronze Medal
High School Division
1 Title
2 Titles
3 Titles
4 Titles
5 Titles
| Grand Prize | 2nd | 3rd | Complete Results | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | GEMS-Taiwan  |
GreatBay-Scie  |
iGEM 2024 | |||
| 2023 | Japan-United  |
BASIS-China |
iGEM 2023 | |||
| 2022 | Lambert_GA  |
PuiChing_Macau  |
iGEM 2022 | |||
| 2021 | LINKS_China |
SZ_SHD |
iGEM 2021 | |||
| 2020 | TAS Taipei |
GreatBay SCIE |
iGEM 2020 | |||
| 2019 | GreatBay SZ |
iGEM 2019[permanent dead link] | ||||
| 2018 | GreatBay China [note 1] |
iGEM 2018[permanent dead link] | ||||
| 2017 | TAS Taipei |
iGEM 2017 | ||||
| 2016 | HSiTAIWAN |
iGEM 2016 | ||||
| 2015 | TAS Taipei |
iGEM HS 2015 | ||||
| 2014 | CSIA-SouthKorea  |
TP CC-SanDiego [note 2] |
TAS Taipei |
iGEM HS 2014 | ||
| 2013 | Lethbridge Canada  |
AUC Turkey  |
CIDEB-UANL Mexico  |
iGEM HS 2013 | ||
| 2012 | Heidelberg LSL  |
NC School of Sci Math |
CIDEB-UANL Mexico |
iGEM HS 2012 | ||
| 2011 | Years prior to 2012 had no separate high school division. | |||||
High School Ranking by Country
| Country | Grand Prize | Runners-Up | Top 2 Total |
|---|---|---|---|
 Chinese Taipei | 5 | 0 | 5 |
 China | 3 | 4 | 7 |
 United States | 1 | 2 | 3 |
 Canada | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Germany | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Japan | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 South Korea | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Macao | 0 | 1 | 1 |
 Turkey | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Undergraduate Division
1 Title
2 Titles
3 Titles
Undergraduate Ranking by Country
| Country | Grand Prize | Runners-Up | 2nd Runners-Up | Top 3 Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 3 | 3 | 3 | 9 |
 Slovenia | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
 United Kingdom | 2 | 3 | 2 | 7 |
| United States | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 |
 Lithuania | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
 Netherlands | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
 France | 1 | 3 | 1 | 5 |
| China | 1 | 1 | 5 | 7 |
| Canada | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Chinese Taipei | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
 Spain | 1 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
 Australia | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
 Singapore | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
 Czech Republic | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Poland | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Hong Kong | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
Overgraduate Division
1 Title
2 Titles
3 Titles
4 Titles
| Grand Prize | 2nd | 3rd | Top 10 | Complete Results | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Marburg |
Aachen |
Aachen EPFL Evry-Paris-Saclay
Freiburg Ionis-Paris Marburg Toulouse-INSA-UPS TUM Straubing UToronto WageningenUR |
iGEM 2024 | |
| 2023 | Estonia-TUIT  |
Leiden  |
iGEM 2023 | ||
| 2022 | UCopenhagen  |
Montpellier  |
iGEM 2022 | ||
| 2021 | Marburg |
TU Delft |
iGEM 2021 | ||
| 2020 | Leiden |
Aachen |
iGEM 2020 | ||
| 2019 | EPFL  |
Wageningen UR |
iGEM 2019 | ||
| 2018 | Marburg |
Munich |
iGEM 2018[permanent dead link] | ||
| 2017 | TU Delft |
Munich [note 7] |
iGEM 2017 | ||
| 2016 | Munich [note 8] |
Wageningen UR |
iGEM 2016 | ||
| 2015 | TU Delft |
BGU Israel  |
iGEM 2015 | ||
| 2014 | UC Davis |
Wageningen |
TU Darmstadt |
iGEM 2014 | |
| 2013 | Paris Bettencourt |
Bielefeld |
Sun Yat-sen |
iGEM 2013[note 9] | |
| 2012 | Years prior to 2013 had no separate overgraduate division. | ||||
Overgraduate Ranking by Country
| Country | Grand Prize | Runners-Up | Top 2 Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Germany | 4 | 5 | 9 |
| Netherlands | 3 | 5 | 8 |
| France | 1 | 1 | 2 |
 Denmark | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Estonia | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Switzerland | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| United States | 1 | 0 | 1 |
 Israel | 0 | 1 | 1 |
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- Team from seven different high schools.
- Combined team from Torrey Pines High School and Canyon Crest Academy.
- In 2013 iGEM was divided into an undergraduate and an overgraduate section. The criterion for division was the participation of team members older than 23 years.
- Students were from different universities of Paris (Paris Descartes University, Paris Diderot University, Pierre and Marie Curie University).
- As of June 2012, the 2011 results page does not include results from the Championship Jamboree; but details can be found at the Jamboree page.
- 2007 had six finalists but none were selected as specific runners-up.
- Combined team from Technische Universität München and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
- Combined team from Technische Universität München and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
- In 2013 iGEM was divided into an undergraduate and an overgraduate section. The criterium for division was the participance of team members older than 23 years.
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