iGEM Technology

Have you ever worked on a laptop computer? (perhaps you are reading this post on a laptop right now?) Have you ever used a cell phone to take a picture? Or get directions using your GPS? Have you ever had your temperature taken in your ear? Or lived in a home with a smoke detector? Or rested your head on a memory foam pillow? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are the beneficiary of space innovation!

Software plays a transformative role in driving advances in synthetic biology. From designing biological systems and automating lab equipment, to managing collaborations and analyzing vast amounts of data, software underpins many of the essential tasks in making biology easier to engineer.

While all iGEM teams push the boundaries of synthetic biology, teams who undertake plant projects must overcome a challenge that is particular to plants – namely, that plants take a long time to grow. One reason iGEM teams are successful in pioneering plant synthetic biology is because the teams that have come before have expended effort to get plants to grow within the timeframe of an iGEM Competition season. In honor of the 20th year of iGEM, we thought we’d take a look back on the achievements of some of the teams that have pioneered plant synthetic biology.

Hardware, Software, Wetware – all are encompassed within the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle of synthetic biology. In honor of 20 years of iGEM, we’d like to feature the Hardware developed by iGEM teams.

Dive deeper into an exciting journey of endless curiosity of what is called “Frugal Science”, highlight notable innovations like the Foldscope and share the inspiring story of an iGEM Team from the Lambert high school who grabbed a gold medal at the 2018 Giant Jamboree with their frugal innovation project.

Twenty years ago, scientists were using an ad hoc approach to assemble genetic constructs, which required a lot of time and did not always work as anticipated. Tom Knight, an engineer by training, thought that applying standard engineering mechanisms could make the assembly of genetic constructs more reliable. And so, in 2003, Tom proposed an assembly method for standard biological parts, or “BioBricks”.

DNA Day (April 25) is just around the corner. As you can imagine, DNA is a rather big deal at iGEM. In just a few short weeks, the 2023 iGEM Distribution kit - containing thousands of physical DNA parts - will be sent in the mail to teams all around the world. Take a moment to consider what it means to have a curated collection of DNA parts from iGEM’s entire 20-year history arriving in your mailbox!

Registration is open now for the 14th International Workshop on Bio-Design Automation (IWBDA) to be held October 24-26, 2022 in Paris at the iGEM Grand Jamboree. IWBDA will bring together researchers from the synthetic biology, systems biology, and design automation communities to discuss concepts, methodologies and software tools for the computational analysis and synthesis of biological systems.

In 2012, George Church, Yuan Gao, and Sriram Kosuri published their work “Next Generation Digital Information Storage” in the journal Science. Using DNA's four-letter nucleotide code of A, G, T, and C to encode the 0s and 1s of a digitized file, they were the first to demonstrate that DNA could be used as a storage medium. Fast forward to today, and you’ll see numerous developments in reading and writing different forms of data on DNA to make DNA storage more efficient and cost effective.

One of the big challenges facing the field of synthetic biology is the ability to obtain reliable and repeatable measurements in different labs – a key component of all engineering disciplines. Over the past several years, iGEMers have been tackling this challenge through the International InterLaboratory (Interlab) Measurement Studies.

When James Watson, Francis Crick, Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, and colleagues published their seminal work on the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, scientists were at a turning point in understanding how genetic material works. Now, just 70 years later, graduate, undergraduate, and even high school students apply their knowledge of how genetic material works to engineer biology itself; using it to address the world’s biggest problems such as climate change, biodiversity, human health, and more.

This Friday – March 4 – is World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development, a United Nations’ international day for celebrating engineers and engineering. It’s a day to recognize the critical role of engineers in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to ensure that everyone has access to clean water, sanitation, reliable energy, and other basic human needs. In honor of World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development, we’d like to highlight the accomplishments of iGEM teams in engineering biological solutions towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

iGEM’s new purpose is to make sure synthetic biology gets developed everywhere by everyone. Yet, how can we talk about “synthetic biology” all around the world when most scientific papers (and podcasts, blog posts, et cetera) are still developed and shared only in English?

March 4th is World Engineering Day for Sustainable Development. In honor of this day, we’d like to highlight the accomplishments of iGEM teams engineering biological solutions for global challenges as articulated in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The iGEM 2018 Interlab study, which was just published in Nature Communications Biology, presents a cheap and easy protocol for estimating cell count and per-cell fluorescence on plate readers.

Through iGEM Insights, we aim leverage data from iGEM as a unique open and international testbed to both improve the competition and the practice of synthetic biology (and science and engineering more broadly) beyond the competition.

The iGEM Measurement Committee is happy to help you learn about the concepts, tools, and resources that are available to iGEM teams. In this post, we address three questions:

What is cloning and gene assembly?
Why is cloning and gene assembly important?
How is cloning and gene assembly done?