This weekend, 59 teams of undergraduates will be descending on Cambridge, Mass., for the 4th annual International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, aka the iGEM Jamoboree. I'm heading up there tomorrow to blog the event live.

The event is a synthetic biology contest that grew out of a short course held at MIT in 2003. Students - mostly undergrads - spend the summer designing and building genetic machines from a standard set of biological parts called "biobricks." Last year's winners, from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, engineered cells that fight sepsis. This year, the Ljubljana team is back, with a synthetic antiviral defense system against HIV.

Check in this weekend for updates as the judges poke and prod that project and others, such as learning-enabled E. coli and microbes with metabolisms tweaked to produce biofuels.