Giant Jamboree/Projects

PROJECTS

iGEM projects are developed by students college students from all over the world. They focus their research and efforts with help of the iGEM tracks. You can find more information about each track and the teams participating in each one of them in this page.

	Community Labs In 2014 for the first time, the iGEM competition will expand to include the DIYbio community by adding the Community Lab Track. iGEM requires a large investment in time and money to participate, but its format as annual competition actually facilitates fundraising, recruitment, and general motivation to do something BIG.
	Environment The quality of the air, water, and land, both on Earth and other heavenly bodies, limits the happiness of humans and other creatures. Can biotechnology be used to help clean the air, provide fresh drinking water, restore or enhance soil quality, terraform a near-Earth asteroid, or protect, preserve, or enhance natural biological diversity?
	New Application New Application is an apt description for a track that doesn't have a common problem, or focus tying all projects together. It is the novelty of ideas and approach in investigating a question that may never have previously been examined that qualifies a project in the New Application track.
	Entrepreneurship Teams who interested in commercializing their work in synthetic biology register on this tracks. Teams can apply with software, hardware and wetlab projects they wish to develop.
	Energy A major economic driver for most countries is energy availability and use. The ability for a nation to produce it's own transportation fuel, irrespective available natural resources will be a huge source of economic growth in the 21st century. Synthetic biology may have the answer to some, if not all of these pressing global issues.
	Food and Nutrition People need to eat. Planes, trains, and automobiles need to eat too. Can biotechnology be responsibly used to produce food or energy without causing widespread shortages of either, and without harming the environment that future generations will inherit?
	Manufacturing The ribosome is a programmable nanoassembler embedded within a reproducing machine. Could we responsibly use biology to manufacture useful products, from the nanoscale (atoms) to the decascale (buildings and bridges)? What can biology be programmed to manufacture?
	Health and Medicine iGEM teams have access to many great advanced techniques and have the potential to make significant progress towards developing new therapy and drug concepts. Unencumbered by conventional drug discovery paradigms, teams can decide they want to engineer cancer detecting systems into E. coli using organisms instead of molecules.
	Policy and Practices Human Practices have been a part of iGEM for many years as a core element of iGEM activities within each team. This year, we have created a track for teams that wish to work exclusively in the policy and practices area of synthetic biology.
	Measurement Precise measurements lie at the foundation of every scientific discipline, including synthetic biology. The limits of our knowledge are set by how well we can connect observations to reproducible quantities that give insight. Measurement is also an act of communication, allowing researchers to make meaningful comparisons between their observations.
	Art and Design Teams of science and engineering students collaborating with artists and designers to develop their ideas through speculative scenario planning or future product prototyping.
	Foundational Advance While DNA sequencing and synthesis are advancing in capacity at a rate about five times faster than Moore's law, they are not the only technologies necessary to bring about this revolution. The Foundational Advance track allows teams to come up with novel solution to technical problems surrounding core synbio technologies.
	Software Computational work and software development are a very important part of Synthetic Biology. The iGEM competition again has a track for teams that want to focus on exactly that.
	Information Processing Information Processing in iGEM covers a diverse range of projects.Teams enter this track if they are attempting projects such as building elements of a biological computer, creating a game using biology or working on a signal processing challenges.
	Microfluidics Microfluidic, or “lab-on-a-chip” technology, is a maturing field of research involving miniaturized systems where fluids are manipulated on the scale of nanoliters and picoliters. With microfluidics it is possible to perform high-throughput biological experiments integrating multiple functions in devices no larger than a postage stamp.