Synthetic Biology:  iGEM after the storm

The international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition has been marked this year by the catastrophic passage of hurricane Sandy. Flight cancellations and delays prevented some teams to reach iGEM’s headquarters in Boston area on time, but the competition proceeded successfully as scheduled. Besides the storm, the 2012 edition might well be remembered as a turning point in many aspects: In January this year the iGEM Foundation was set as an independent non-profit organization located in Cambridge, MA, and the iGEM expanded beyond the Collegiate division in two parallel competitions for entrepreneurs and high school students; five regional Jamborees (Americas East and West, Latin America, Europe and Asia) served as a first round of selection for 190 teams worldwide, only one third of which advanced to the World Championship Jamboree that took place last November 2-5^th; and, finally, a new judging process based on multiple entries organized in a computer-managed rubric has been set in place in order to help choosing among the many excellent Synthetic Biology projects presented this year. In the last day of the competition, four European teams reached the final and one of them, Groningen, with a holistic and heterodox (standard-free) strategy for the identification of promoters to identify volatiles from spoiled meat by microarray analysis, was awarded the Grand Prize. Year after year, team projects, logistics and judging are getting more and more complex and this life-like increasing complexity will be –if the weather allows it- the major challenge future iGEM editions will have to cope with.