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What is the most exciting thing natural scientists and engineers can do together? - The iGEM summer competition!
iGEM is an international student competition in the field of Synthetic Biology, organized by MIT. Each participating university sets up an interdisciplinary student team consisting of 8 to 10 biologists/chemists and engineers.
Half of the team has to be undergraduate students, but also MSc and PhD students can participate.
The team's goal is to collect ideas on a novel biological system, analyze the biological and engineering design alternatives, including mathematical modeling of the system, and choose the 'best' design.
This system is then translated into DNA code, put into a cell and tested experimentally.
In November, all teams present their projects at the MIT in Boston. In 2007, there were 57 teams from all over the world, including teams from MIT, UCSF, Caltech, Duke, Stanford, TIT, Princeton, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and more teams from the US, Australia, India, China, Japan, and Europe (http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Main_Page ).
After major successes in 2005 (best engineering), 2006(best device) and 2007 (best presentation), ETH is participating again this year, and Profs. Sven Panke and Jörg Stelling are assembling a mixed team of Engineers and natural scientists from the Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. level. If you want to be part of the iGEM experience, apply until April 11th on
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