Late Jan 2010

The International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition is an annual undergraduate competition with a specific focus on Synthetic Biology. Hosted yearly at MIT, it brings together a large number of students, researchers and other interested individuals with the common interest of furthering and disseminating knowledge and techniques in use in the field. Each team that enters the competition is required to create and maintain a wiki provided detailed introductions, results and methods used in the construction of the synthetic systems. Using these wikis a shortlist of system designs were chosen and we began looking at using GenoCAD to reproduce the designs of these synthetic systems.

The issue encountered with this tool was the absence of parts used in some of these designs from the GenoCAD parts libraries. Because it wasn't absolutely necessary to choose from the more recent IGEM competitions and the fact that there would be an increased likelihood of the GenoCAD library containing somewhat "older" parts, we also began consideration of entries from 2008.