Marburg team wins iGEM competition in Boston

The iGEM team of the Philipps-Universität Marburg and the Center for Synthetic Microbiology (SYNMIKRO) has won this year's International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition in Boston.

More than 300 teams from universities around the world participated in this year's iGEM competition in Boston to compete with their synthetic biology projects. The annual iGEM competition is hosted by the Foundation of the same name, an independent non-profit organization that aims to raise public awareness of the new branch of synthetic biology and encourage independent student research.

In their project "Vibrigens - Accelerating Synbio" the team, consisting of 19 Bachelor and Master students of various disciplines, has established Vibrio natriegens as a new tool in molecular biology and synthetic biology. The enormous doubling time of V. natriegens with only about seven minutes allows research work to be carried out more than twice as fast as before. This could lead to a quantum leap in molecular biology, biotechnology and biomedical research.

However, not only does research play a role in competition assessment - students are also encouraged to present and discuss their project and, more generally, synthetic biology in public. This year, the "Marburgers" organized the meeting of the German iGEM teams and continued their long-term cooperation with the Marburger Blindenstudienanstalt (BLISTA), for example to develop concepts for the barrier-free presentation of research data on the Internet.

SYNMIKRO, the Departments of Chemistry and Biology of the Philipps-Universität, the MPI for Terrestrial Microbiology, the Behring-Röntgen Foundation, Hessen Trade & Invest and numerous companies supported the team.

We congratulate the Marburg iGEM team and their supervisors, the SYNMIKRO scientists Prof. Dr. Gert Bange and Dr. Georg Fritz, to their great success!