Thankyou to everyone who has sent us a soil sample, please view our wiki page to see a picture of what grew from your soil :)

What is iGEM? (International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition)_

iGEM is an international competition organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston.

The competition is built upon a new scientific field known as Synthetic biology; the design and construction of biological
devices and systems for useful purposes.

Undergraduate student teams from all around the world compete to design the best real world application. Last years winning team were able to re-design bacteria to act as a type of sensor for rotten meat. The design would make sell-by-dates of meat redundant, and therefore help to reduce wastage of food; surprisingly still a big problem in the 21st century.


UEA Project

Team NRP-UEA-Norwich iGEM 2013 are developing a biosensor that will enable the identification of novel antimycin-producing strains of streptomycetes. Antibiotic resistance is a rapidly growing global problem and is being exacerbated by the failure to discover new antibiotics.

Antimycins produced by streptomycetes are active against various fungi through inhibition of the final stage of electron transport, and it has also been suggested that modified antimycins could be effective anti-cancer drugs. Building up a library of antimycin gene clusters will broaden known pathway(biosynthetic) diversity with the foresight of facilitating genetic engineering.

In the long term, pathways could be engineered to create new variants of antimycin with unique or enhanced properties.