Bronze medal for the team iGEM

Thanks to the sponsoring of IECB, Université Bordeaux Segalen, Mission pour la Science et la Technologie de l’Ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis, Thermo Scientific, the Labri, and the UFR des Sciences de la Vie de Bordeaux; a team from Bordeaux took part for the first time to the iGEM competition in 2012.

The iGEM is an international competition in the field of synthetic biology opened to undergraduate and PhD students. This year, our project of a “bacterial eyespot” was to engineer a single strain of E. coli to produce different phenotypes depending on the signal sent by the neighboring cells. The details of our work are available on the team wiki: http://2012.igem.org/Team:Bordeaux. 

Our results were presented, both as an oral presentation and a poster, during the Regional Jamboree in Amsterdam on the 6 and 7 of October. The Regional Jamboree gave us the opportunity to exchange ideas and methods with ~500 other participants from Europe, and also with their instructors.

This experience was a real enrichment both for intellectual and technical work and opened our minds on what synthetic biology has to offer to society. Many innovative projects, which could become a reality within a few years, were presented. The iGEM is first of all a competition, but it also has for goal to develop synthetic biology through the world. All teams contribute to the enrichment of scientific culture with original ideas and DNA sequences available to all future participants.

After the end of the 2012 edition, the Bordeaux team received a Bronze medal despite not being qualified for the finals at MIT.  After this first experience we are more determined than ever and will aim for a gold medal in 2013!