iGEM is go

It's 10.30am on Saturday morning and I've been to two meetings and three talks so far today. iGEM must have started.

One of my meetings was the pre-game meeting for judges. Great to see how seriously the judges are taking the job of judging 80 diverse teams all of whom are giving oral presentations and posters over the course of 8 hours. Tom and Drew, the head judges have done a really nice job of putting a system in place to ensure everyone is judged fairly. The 35 judges have a long day ahead of them...

I'll be covering the health and medicine track today. We've already had the chance to see Calgary talking about engineering bugs to sense and kill pathogens in hosts, Strasbourg gave a nice presentation about their work to build a binary cell division counter in yeast, and finally University of Chicago presented their work to express sticky proteins (normally only made in mussels) in heterologous hosts such as E. coli and Caulobacter. Of note, two of the three teams I saw this morning were first-time teams. iGEM growth continues to be impressive.

On to the next session...

Posted by Barry Canton