EPFL Team Scores High in Synthetic Biology Competition
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EPFL students from Life Sciences, Microengineering, Physics and Computer Science bring home a Gold Medal and a Special Prize in this year's international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.
Gold medal and co-laureate of this year's "iGEMers Prize"! An interdisciplinary team of 10 students (backgrounds: Life Sciences, Microengineering, Physics, Computer Science), coached by IBI's Sebastian Maerkl and Bart Deplancke for EPFL's third participation in the international Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM), scored a great success with its project nicknamed "Asaia, the Pink Force against Malaria", aimed at engineering a bacterium that naturally lives in a mosquito's gut, to express an immunotoxin that can prevent malaria agent plasmodium falciparum from infecting its host (read summary here). The EPFL team achieved a Gold Medal and was co-awarded the “iGEMers Prize" at MIT (Cambridge, MA, USA) during the annual "iGEM jamboree" held November 6-8, 2010, which brought together 130 teams and some 2000 participants from all over the world. The “iGEMers Prize" is attributed by vote of all participating teams and thus reflects a project's impact on the iGEM community as a whole. Worth noting, EPFL's team shares the honor with 4 others who are among the most successful in the 2010 competition: Slovenia (Grand Prize Winner, Best New Application Area, Best New BioBrick ), Cambridge (Finalist, Best Wiki), Imperial College London (Finalist, Best Human Practices Award, Best Wiki), and MIT (Best Manufacturing Project)...