n a November weekend, more than 800 people gathered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to show off six months of hard work. Each person wore one of 84 different shirts; some had a classic, young, professional design, while others adopted a more playful approach-drawings of yeast having sex, for example.
Eighty-four shirts, eighty-four teams. The competition in which they were participating, called the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition, or iGEM, has a big goal: Revolutionize the engineering of biology.
Synthetic vaccine nabs iGEM prize
PLUS: Online-only sidebar - Standardize What?
It works like this: In the spring, teams of students from around the world, mostly undergraduates, are mailed a collection of DNA constructs, mostly made from Escherichia coli. These constructs, called biological "parts," can include simple elements, such as DNA-binding domains, or more complex ...
