by Alba Iglesias Vilches

PhD candidate at Newcastle University

and member of the iGEM Diversity & Inclusion Committee

Joining my first iGEM team …

It was December 2011. I was 18 years old and had been at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in Spain for only two months when I saw an advertisement that caught my attention: a group of researchers at the Universitat de València (UV) were looking for students to work mainly during the summer months on a project that would be presented in the world’s most important synthetic biology competition – iGEM.

At that time, I didn’t know what synthetic biology was. I had never touched a pipette, and of course had no idea what a researcher's day was like, but it seemed like an opportunity to learn that could help me start down the path of my professional career.

With more courage than experience, I presented my CV. And in a short period of time, and after passing an interview, I met with the researchers who led the team. I began to learn scientific terms that I barely knew and about synthetic biology.

As happens to many people in the beginning, I had doubts. I didn’t know if I was prepared enough, but my excitement overcame that feeling of disorientation and I began working on the first task assigned to me. And cherishing the idea of showing the results of the work at the European Jamboree in Amsterdam (and if we were lucky at the World Jamboree in Boston) made me forget the long-awaited holidays by the sea with my friends and everything else. I was convinced the experience would be worth it!

One of the first challenges I faced was in presenting project ideas during brainstorming sessions in front over 15 people who had much more experience than I had. I was a first-year student and the youngest person on the team. But I knew that overcoming fear makes one brave. I contributed my grain of sand during the brainstorming phase, but above all I began to learn, a lot, as I had never done.

For our iGEM project, my teammates and I wanted to create a system that would allow us to talk with bacteria and yeasts. While working in the lab with my teammates, I realized that this train was going very fast – it seemed we would never have enough time to finish our iGEM project the way we would like to finish it. And so, we formed a close-knit team in which each one of us contributed, and those with the most experience shared their experience so that we could all work and move forward together in the same direction.

Good teammates make you learn and grow. We had gone from being a team to being a family. Deadlines were approaching. Summer passed. Classes began at the university, and we worked to make our course loads as compatible as we could with the final experiments we needed for our iGEM project. Despite the lack of time, we celebrated each small achievement in the lab.

Time flew by quickly and before we knew it, we were at the European Jamboree in Amsterdam, sharing our experience with teams from all over Europe who had the same enthusiasm and the same dreams as we did. These were very intense and emotional days. Everyone – students and supervisors alike – shared tiredness and enthusiasm in equal parts.

iGEM 2011 Valencia Biocampus team at the European Regional Jamboree in Amsterdam

That year we didn’t make it to the World Jamboree, but I realized that I had won much more: I had learned with good colleagues, formed a team, received the support of great experts in synthetic biology, and … most meaningful of all … I had discovered my vocation.

Joining an iGEM team for the second time …

When I started my second year at UPV, I realized that I not only had more knowledge, but I had learned to carry out an iGEM project from scratch. From looking for sponsors and crowdfunding campaigns, to designing BioBricks, building plasmids and transforming bacteria, through to participating in events of scientific communication among other things, I had the privilege of being an experienced iGEMer.

I obviously didn’t hesitate a moment in joining the University of Valencia iGEM team again – same laboratory, same supervisors, partially renovated student team and a totally new project. Like the previous year, my teammates and I brainstormed together in choosing a project. We chose a somewhat riskier but also more attractive project than the previous year: we wanted to create the first artificial nematode-bacterial symbiosis.

Building on our experience from the previous year, we decided to focus on making the wiki more attractive and the experiments very visual. We made sure our efforts were well focused. This time the work had the desired reward: our team passed from the European Jamboree to the World Jamboree.

Our experience at the World Jamboree could not have been better. We came back from Boston with the “Best New Application” Award, and we managed to publish the results of both projects in peer-reviewed journals - Letters in Applied Microbiology and ACS Synthetic Biology.

These were great rewards for our hard work. It is true that I already had a little more experience and had gained in confidence, but my teammates and I had worked on a new project, starting from scratch. We learned to work with new chassis organisms, such as C. elegans and P. putida. Forming a new team of first-time and experienced iGEMers made the experience different, although equally enriching.

Becoming an iGEM mentor…

The following year I decided that an international stay would enrich me professionally, so I took the opportunity offered by the Erasmus + program to finish my university studies in Krakow, Poland. During my year in Krakow I did not have the opportunity to participate on an iGEM team since there were none in the city. But I wanted to remain connected to the iGEM spirit and so I enrolled in the mentoring program and was a mentor to a Latin American team that was participating in iGEM for the first time.

Learning in Paris …

The vocation for synthetic biology had entered into me as unexpectedly as I had entered into synthetic biology. That's why I searched among the best postgraduate studies in synthetic biology in Europe and chose Paris, France to study for a master's degree in this subject about which I was so passionate.

The studies and work in Paris opened my mind and taught me that in synthetic and systems biology there are no limits, especially when combined with other disciplines such as physics, chemistry or mathematics.

During that year in Paris I learned that synthetic biology can achieve totally unimaginable things, and I lived one of my best experiences again: I participated as a student on an iGEM team for the third time. Naturally, my experience that year was quite different from my earlier experiences. This time, the team was totally student-led. As MSc students, my teammates and I organized weekly journal clubs where we presented and discussed papers that we had read recently. We did that until we found an idea to develop into an iGEM project.

iGEM 2016 Evry team at the first European Meet-Up in Paris

We did interesting things like organizing the first European Meet-Up in Paris, but the organization system was complex. Deadlines were pressing and reaching agreements through this system was difficult, there was a lack of supervisors who were totally involved in the project, and there was a great deal of similarity in the backgrounds of the students that made up the team. I therefore decided that it would be more profitable to develop my work in iGEM as a team advisor rather than as a student.

Becoming an iGEM instructor, judge, and committee member …

Continuing with the objective of completing my training, I am currently doing a PhD in Newcastle, UK, where I have had the opportunity of being an instructor of the iGEM team for two years.

Here, the team is led by a group of researchers who are experts in synthetic biology. Logistics, organization and student participation in the iGEM team is similar to what I experienced at the University of Valencia. Students choose their own project and work on it during the summer months, with the aim of presenting their project at the Jamboree in Boston. Perhaps the most significant difference between developing an iGEM project in the UK, as compared to France or Spain, is that students in the UK receive financial compensation for their work. And any help is good!

During these last two years, I’ve also had the opportunity of being a judge in the Giant Jamboree. Becoming a judge has made me see the competition from another point of view. I’ve learned to evaluate as fairly as possible and to work as a team with other judges in discussing and making the most appropriate decisions.

Alba Iglesias with fellow judges at the 2018 Giant Jamboree

In addition, I’ve learned two wonderful things about being a judge. First, through interacting with the teams, I get to see how the results of their work are filled with passion, enthusiasm and nerves. And second, I get to keep learning, because to assess the teams fairly I must read and learn about their research topics.

And for the past few months I’ve also been a member of the iGEM Diversity & Inclusion Committee, where I work together with my fellow committee members to promote diversity and foster inclusion within the iGEM community.

Reflections on the iGEM experience…

In conclusion, and according to my experience, each team is different and it is this difference that truly enriches iGEM. Some teams are led by researchers with academic and/or business experience, and other teams are led by the students themselves. In some teams the supervisors choose the project, in others it is the students who choose and design the project – sometimes following certain lines of research previously agreed with a sponsor, and sometimes letting their imagination loose and carrying out projects that have no relationship with the research lines of their supervisors or sponsors.

Given the diversity of existing teams and different forms of work, it is sometimes difficult to assess the work of all iGEM teams fairly. There are those who see iGEM as an educational project and others who already expect a lot of professionalism from the students. In the same way, there are teams that develop a new project every year, teams that base their projects on those of previous years, and teams that (against the iGEM spirit) work on the same project for several years and present it as if it had been carried out in three months.

Some teams are made up of very small numbers of students, while other teams are very large. And of course, some teams work in the best research centres and universities in the world with all the economic and material support that this entails, while others are modest but very fighting teams that build their own equipment to carry out experiments.

With time and experience I have learned many things from iGEM. Of course, it is different to see iGEM as a judge or advisor or mentor than to live it as a student. I’ve come to appreciate the difference between iGEM teams from different universities and regions of the world as a true reflection of the global economic imbalance, and so I believe iGEM should be seen more as an educational project than as a competition.

Whether you participate as a student, as an advisor or as a judge, the important thing is the vital learning you’ll get from iGEM. My advice to current and future iGEMers is to look forward to fight for your dreams, sideways to know who accompanies you in realizing those dreams, and back to appreciate those who have helped you achieve them.