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• Tracks
  • Energy
  • Environment
  • Food and Nutrition
  • Foundational Advance
  • Health and Medicine
  • Information Processing
  • Manufacturing
  • New Application
• New Tracks
• Art and Design
• Community Labs
• Measurement
• Policy and Practices
• Software
• Awards
• Requirements
• Questions

Tracks

Tracks in the iGEM competition allow teams to focus their project towards a specific subject area within synthetic biology and allow them to know who they will compete against for the track award. Traditionally iGEM teams have chosen to enter their projects into one of the following tracks:

• Energy
• Environment
• Food and Nutrition
• Foundational Advance
• Health and Medicine
• Information Processing
• Manufacturing
• New Application

If you browse through the track links to the left of this page, you can find a short description of each track with abstracts and links to winners from the 2011 - 2013 competitions.

We're introducing the idea of "New Tracks" to the competition this year. We have the ability for teams to compete in subject areas that traditionally were not recognized in iGEM or didn't have the opportunity to participate.

The idea behind separating out Tracks and New Tracks is to highlight that the there are differences in the scope of work and also in the evaluation. New Tracks have different requirements and different types of projects from the other iGEM tracks. For example, microfluidics teams must sign up by the end of March as we need to plan for a workshop and for the team hardware requirements.

Teams participating in the standard iGEM Tracks are not required to choose a track until later in the summer.

New Tracks

We are introducing seven new tracks to the iGEM 2014 competition. On top of our regular tracks such as Foundational Advance and Health and Medicine, we also have the new tracks listed in the menu to the side. Participation is open and we don't intend to limit the number of tracks, with the exception of Microfluidics (due to hardware requirements).

• Art and Design
• Community Labs
• Measurement
• Policy and Practices
• Software

We recognize that software and entrepreneurship have featured in the iGEM competition in the past. They are considered new tracks in 2014 to highlight that these teams will be evaluated differently to other teams. We are working on the evaluation requirements for teams and will post them as they become available later in the iGEM calendar.

Awards

Awards in iGEM in 2014 are taking on a new dimension. For example: while you will be able to compete in the Policy and Practices track for the P&P track award, there will also be a Policy and Practices prize available across all tracks.

New Track teams have the same eligibility for awards as all other iGEM teams, pending confirmation from the judging committee. For example, this makes them eligible for (but not limited to) the Best Poster, Best Presentation, Best Wiki, Best New Part (Natural) awards as well as the Undergraduate and Overgraduate BioBrick Trophies.

There are four New Track prizes that all iGEM teams are eligible to win. These are:

• Art and Design
• Measurement
• Policy and Practices (Formerly Human Practices)
• Software

This allows us to reward teams who do excellent work in areas beyond their core track. If you make an excellent piece of software, for example, you will now be able to select your team for the software prize, even if you're not in the software track. Another way to explain this is the awards cover the depth of work in the tracks, while the prizes cover the breadth of all tracks in the competition. This new mechanism allows us to reward more great work by iGEM teams. The Graphic below shows award and prize eligibility in more detail:

Requirements

Teams who choose to enter these tracks will need to meet iGEM Requirements unless otherwise stated. Requirements specific to each new track are stated on the new track pagse, as well as on the iGEM 2014 Requirements page.

• iGEM 2014 Requirements for all teams
• iGEM 2014 Additional requirements for all new track teams

Questions

If you have any questions about these new awards please visit our corresponding wiki pages or contact HQ [at] iGEM [dot] ORG.

Be sure to check back soon for more details.