Regions/Europe/Jamboree/Blog

From 2011.igem.org

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<div class="post-451 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-2011 category-igem category-statistics">
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<span class="postlabel"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=451"><span>22</span>Sep</a></span>
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<h2 class="post-title"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=451">European Wiki Freeze Special</a></h2>
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<p class="info">
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<span class="catinfo">Filed in <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=15" title="View all posts in 2011" rel="category">2011</a> | <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=7" title="View all posts in iGEM" rel="category">iGEM</a> | <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=71" title="View all posts in Statistics" rel="category">Statistics</a></span>
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<span class="cmtinfo"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=451#respond" title="Comment on European Wiki Freeze Special">Leave a comment</a></span>
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Hello World!
 
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<div class="post-499 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-uncategorized">
 
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<span class="postlabel"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=499"><span>23</span>Sep</a></span>
 
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<h2 class="post-title"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=499">Hello World: Meet the rookies!</a></h2>
 
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<p class="info">
 
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<span class="catinfo">Filed in <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=1" title="View all posts in Uncategorized" rel="category">Uncategorized</a></span>
 
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<span class="cmtinfo"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=499#respond" title="Comment on Hello World: Meet the rookies!">Leave a comment</a></span>
 
</p>
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<div class="entry"><p>We are saying hello to a good deal of new European contenders this year, and many of them have big ambitions for their first projects. Let’s take a brief look at all of them.</p>
 
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
 
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<div id="attachment_501" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 314px"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?attachment_id=501" rel="attachment wp-att-501"><img class="size-full wp-image-501" title="6a00d4142829d33c7f0100a7f802c9000e" src="http://igemwatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/6a00d4142829d33c7f0100a7f802c9000e.jpg" alt="" width="304" height="300" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Say hello to the rookie teams!</p></div>
 
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<p><em>Amsterdam</em></p>
 
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<p>This year Amsterdam are hosting the regional conference, so it’s good to se them represented as a new team as well. They are working on making E. Coli that will grow at temperatures far below normal limits. They also aimed to make coli better at resisting frost. Apparently they have had some success in making the cold resistance work. If you want to read more check our post!</p>
 
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
 
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<p><em>Bilkent_UNAM-Turkey</em></p>
 
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<p>This team is working on using microalgae for biodegradation. Now this use of microorganisms has been a returning theme for many years, but algae are still somewhat new on the iGEM scene. Bilkent_UNAM are specifically working on degrading TNT. Apparently they didn’t get to test their constructs against</p>
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<div class="entry"><div id="attachment_481" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 441px"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?attachment_id=481" rel="attachment wp-att-481"><img class="size-full wp-image-481" title="mr-freeze-evil-plan" src="http://igemwatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/mr-freeze-evil-plan.jpg" alt="" width="431" height="300" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Preliminary investigations point to this man being the culprit who froze your wikis!</p></div>
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<p>Since 11:59 PM Boston time the European wikis have been frozen. This means that the teams cannot update their wikis in the next two weeks. This gives us time to take a look at the big picture instead of focusing on single teams.</p>
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<p>In this post we will look at some numbers and graphs from all the European teams and compare them with the other regions later. For an overview we start out with a map, “The World according to iGEM”, where the different countries’ area has been distorted according to the number of teams participating in the iGEM 2011 competition (a so-called cartogram):</p>
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<div id="attachment_452" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 624px"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?attachment_id=452" rel="attachment wp-att-452"><img class="size-large wp-image-452 " title="The World according to iGEM" src="http://igemwatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/cartogram-1024x452.png" alt="" width="614" height="271" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">The World according to iGEM</p></div>
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<p>As You can see, rather small countries with many teams participating, like the Netherlands, suddenly take up a whole lot of the world map. Sadly only one African team made it through in the end and as a result the African continent has been shrunk a lot in comparison to it’s normal size. Japan and the UK suddenly turn into islands of Greenland-like size because of the high density of iGEM teams there. Let us focus on Europe for now and take a look at where the European teams hail from:</p>
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<td><strong>Country</strong></td>
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<td><strong>Teams participating</strong></td>
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<td>Germany</td>
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<td>5</td>
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<td>England</td>
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<td>5</td>
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<td>France</td>
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<td>4</td>
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<td>Netherlands</td>
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<td>4</td>
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<td>Turkey</td>
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<td>4</td>
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<td>Denmark</td>
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<td>3</td>
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<td>Spain</td>
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<td>3</td>
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<td>Scotland</td>
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<td>3</td>
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<td>Belgium</td>
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<td>2</td>
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<td>Switzerland</td>
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<td>2</td>
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<td>Italy</td>
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<td>2</td>
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<td>Hungary</td>
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<td>1</td>
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<td>Norway</td>
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<td>1</td>
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<td>Poland</td>
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<td>1</td>
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<td>Sweden</td>
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<td>1</td>
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<td>South Africa</td>
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<td>1</td>
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<td>Total:</td>
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<td>42</td>
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<p style="text-align: center;">(We excluded teams that did not pay the registration fee and / or did not submit any parts.)</p>
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<p>These <strong>42</strong> teams consist of <strong>410</strong> students from vastly different fields of study ranging from ecoonomics and psychology, telematics (?!), theoretical physics to microbiology. The average team size for Europe is<strong> 9,76</strong> students per team with the biggest team being TU-Munich with 19 students and the smallest team being ENSPS-Strasburg with 2 team members.</p>
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<p>Overall <strong>638</strong> biobricks were submitted to the partsregistry, which is a mean of <strong>15,19</strong> parts / team. <em>DTU-Denmark 2</em> has submitted 70 biobricks and wins the title for spamming the partsregistry, while<em> Bilkent UNAM-Turkey, St Andrews,ULB Brussel and Lyon INSA-ENS</em> all share the spot for fewest parts submitted with two.</p>
 +
<p>But what is the relation between parts submitted and the amount of members of each team? Let us find out via a chart:</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?attachment_id=459" rel="attachment wp-att-459"><img class="size-large wp-image-459 aligncenter" title="Partsprmember" src="http://igemwatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Partsprmember-1024x734.png" alt="" width="581" height="417" /></a></p>
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<p>From this chart we can see that DTU-Denmark 2 has created a whopping 14 parts per team member, they must have spent day and night in the lab the last year!</p>
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<p>So what about the tracks? Well, let’s just answer that one with a pie-chart, where You can see how the European teams are distributed in the different tracks. It is not unexpected that &#8220;New Application&#8221; and &#8220;Foundational Advance&#8221; are popular tracks, still almost half the European teams this year are competing in these two categories. It&#8217;s also interesting to note that &#8220;Health and Medicine&#8221; has become the smallest category, which is somewhat unexpected given the amount of past contributions in this track. Finally software tools is interesting, not because it is small, but because we aren&#8217;t seeing any of the old software teams, both contributions being from rookie teams this year.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?attachment_id=467" rel="attachment wp-att-467"><img class="size-large wp-image-467 aligncenter" title="png" src="http://igemwatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/png-1024x707." alt="" width="614" height="424" /></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Copenhagen</em></p>
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<p>Out of the 42 teams participating in the European regionals, 15 are competing for the first time. So how did the &#8220;old&#8221; teams fare in the past years? This graph tells us all about that:</p>
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<p>It’s good to see a new Danish team in the competition. Copenhagen are working with cytochrome P450 hydroxylases to rid the world of evil. They want to use E. coli expressing two different CYP’s to bring death to fungi and environmental estrogens. They seem to have had a bumpy ride making their assemblies, but they have good results on with the fungus killer.</p>
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<div id="attachment_470" class="wp-caption aligncenter" style="width: 381px"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?attachment_id=470" rel="attachment wp-att-470"><img class="size-full wp-image-470 " title="Medaljestatistik gamle hold" src="http://igemwatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Medaljestatistik-gamle-hold.png" alt="" width="371" height="511" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Medal results of the &quot;old&quot; teams from Europe competing in 2011: Gold represents that the team received a gold medal, silver a silver medal, bronze a bronze medal. White means that the team did not participate that year and black means that results are not available yet.</p></div>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>DTU-2</em></p>
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<p>We hope You enjoyed our little detour into statistics today &#8211; tomorrow we will return to our more standard writing style and post short (!) reviews of the 15 rookie teams that are going to the regionals in Amsterdam.</p>
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<p>DTU has been with us for 3 years now, but they are growing and have split into two teams. DTU-2 is an all-girl team, who have apparently had a lot of success developing a new assembly standard. Now this has been done many times before, so what makes theirs special? It’s based on the USER enzyme, that let you assemble multiple pieces in a few hours with no need of restriction digest or ligation. Sounds pretty cool. They have been working in fungus and mammalian cells for proof-of-concept with very nice results.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Dundee</em></p>
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<p><em>Disclaimer: The statistics that form the basis for our statistical analysis have been personally mined from the teams&#8217; wikis and iGEM homepage and therefore are prone to personal error and misjudgement. The raw data can be found <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?hl=en_US&amp;hl=en_US&amp;key=0Ag7uLt0Y2JKFdHoycU03V2ZLcjY3QXlQOGprUU5YVlE&amp;output=html">here</a>.</em></p>
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<p>Dundee are working on compartmentalization in E. coli. We’ve already blogged about the project so check it out! As for results they seem to be saving them for the regional.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>ENSPS-Strasburg</em></p>
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<p>This year Strasburg is represented by a software team for the first time. They are only two students, so a small team, even for the software track. They have been working on software for modeling synthetic constructs behavior, and it’s supposed to be biologist friendly (although their background section isn’t entirely biologist friendly).</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Fatih-Turkey</em></p>
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<p>This year we are seeing a lot of Turkish teams, and Fatih is a new player. They are primarily composed of medical students, but also have a cartoonist on the team. Very Cool. They are working to prevent hospital infections by using bacteria to combat each other. They have some results indicating the two bacterial strains are killing each other off, but it seems a bit sketchy; Still impressive for first time competitors though.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Grenoble</em></p>
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<p>These newcomers are making a heavy metal detector that relates a mercury concentration to an IPTG gradient on a test slip. Instead of the usual approach of having a threshold, they are trying to make a more precise indicator of concentration on a proposed “slip”. They have some characterization done, but no demonstration of the final device available.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>METU_BIN-Ankara</em></p>
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<p>Another Turkish team, they are creating software to help iGEM teams and synthetic biologists to search the registry more effectively, and design constructs. It’s a noble effort, and as we all know the registry could use some user-accessibility.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>NTNU-Trondheim</em></p>
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<p>This is the first Norwegian team ever in iGEM so welcome Norway! They have built a stress sensor that outputs mCherry when coli are under stress, and it seems to work.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Potsdam Bioware</em></p>
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<p>These guys have one of the more technical descriptions I’ve read (or maybe it’s just getting late). What I can gather is that they are working with a class of molecules called microviridins, that can be used to block protease activity. Specific viridins would be useful as drugs, targeting specific proteases. I honestly can’t tell if it worked.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Sevilla</em></p>
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<p>Sevilla are making a standard for multicellular Boolean systems. They seem to be making a system that resembles the Peking S team we featured earlier, but the components are probably different.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>UEA-JIC_Norwich</em></p>
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<p>These guys confirm all suspicions that biologists are only interested in algae and moss. They are working to bring these two organisms into iGEM by creating a library of elementary components for others to use later.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>UNITS-Trieste</em></p>
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<p>This is a pretty ambitious project to introduce communication between higher eukaryotes and prokaryotes using quorum sensing. They are trying to create a symbiotic system of the two. They haven’t got final results for all parts, but for a new team it’s a very impressive contribution all-round. Props for a cool wiki too.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p><em>Wageningen_UR</em></p>
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<p>Our final European rookie team is Wageningen UR who are making a quorum sensing based oscillator. They’ve also attempted to engineer an artificial intercellular communication system in the fungus Aspergillus Nidulans. They have also designed a special flow chamber that can be used to study these kinds of QS systems. Good results by the way.</p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p>Welcome to all the new teams, we hope to see you for many years to come!</p>
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<div class="section entry" id="entry505">
 
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<div class="post-505 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-2011 category-blog category-europe-regionals category-igem">
 
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<span class="postlabel"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=505"><span>28</span>Sep</a></span>
 
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<h2 class="post-title"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=505">Liveblogging at the European Regionals</a></h2>
 
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<p class="info">
 
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<span class="catinfo">Filed in <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=15" title="View all posts in 2011" rel="category">2011</a> | <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=16" title="View all posts in Blog" rel="category">Blog</a> | <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=72" title="View all posts in Europe Regionals" rel="category">Europe Regionals</a> | <a href="http://igemwatch.net/?cat=7" title="View all posts in iGEM" rel="category">iGEM</a></span>
 
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<span class="cmtinfo"><a href="http://igemwatch.net/?p=505#respond" title="Comment on Liveblogging at the European Regionals">Leave a comment</a></span>
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<div class="entry"><p>If you follow our twitter you probably know this already, but here it goes again:</p>
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<h3>iGEMwatch is going to the regional jamboree in Amsterdam!</h3>
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<p>Me (LC) and Marc will provide live coverage from the European regionals the whole upcoming weekend (September 30th &#8211; October 2nd), starting with the &#8220;Meeting of the Minds&#8221; organized by the Rathenau Institute on friday night, followed by presentations on saturday, where we will post live from two parallel sessions. Naturally, we will also be tweeting from the poster session on saturday evening to let you know about the most creative and inspiring posters there. We will conclude the coverage on sunday with the presentations of the three finalists and the awards ceremony, so tune in to find out who the favorites for taking the grand prize in Boston are!</p>
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<p>All of this is possible thanks to iGEM HQ and the regional jamboree organizers who have granted us the status of &#8220;blogging volunteers&#8221;; thank you!</p>
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<p>If you also are attending the jamboree then come and say hi to the guy sitting at the presentations continually typing away on his computer &#8211; it would be really nice to meet our readers in person!</p>
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<p>Be ready for a flood of updates and lots of tweets over the weekend.</p>
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Revision as of 16:04, 30 September 2011

Retrieved from "http://2011.igem.org/Regions/Europe/Jamboree/Blog"
22Sep

European Wiki Freeze Special

Filed in 2011 | iGEM | Statistics Leave a comment

Preliminary investigations point to this man being the culprit who froze your wikis!

Since 11:59 PM Boston time the European wikis have been frozen. This means that the teams cannot update their wikis in the next two weeks. This gives us time to take a look at the big picture instead of focusing on single teams.

In this post we will look at some numbers and graphs from all the European teams and compare them with the other regions later. For an overview we start out with a map, “The World according to iGEM”, where the different countries’ area has been distorted according to the number of teams participating in the iGEM 2011 competition (a so-called cartogram):

The World according to iGEM

As You can see, rather small countries with many teams participating, like the Netherlands, suddenly take up a whole lot of the world map. Sadly only one African team made it through in the end and as a result the African continent has been shrunk a lot in comparison to it’s normal size. Japan and the UK suddenly turn into islands of Greenland-like size because of the high density of iGEM teams there. Let us focus on Europe for now and take a look at where the European teams hail from:

Country Teams participating
Germany 5
England 5
France 4
Netherlands 4
Turkey 4
Denmark 3
Spain 3
Scotland 3
Belgium 2
Switzerland 2
Italy 2
Hungary 1
Norway 1
Poland 1
Sweden 1
South Africa 1
Total: 42

(We excluded teams that did not pay the registration fee and / or did not submit any parts.)

These 42 teams consist of 410 students from vastly different fields of study ranging from ecoonomics and psychology, telematics (?!), theoretical physics to microbiology. The average team size for Europe is 9,76 students per team with the biggest team being TU-Munich with 19 students and the smallest team being ENSPS-Strasburg with 2 team members.

Overall 638 biobricks were submitted to the partsregistry, which is a mean of 15,19 parts / team. DTU-Denmark 2 has submitted 70 biobricks and wins the title for spamming the partsregistry, while Bilkent UNAM-Turkey, St Andrews,ULB Brussel and Lyon INSA-ENS all share the spot for fewest parts submitted with two.

But what is the relation between parts submitted and the amount of members of each team? Let us find out via a chart:

From this chart we can see that DTU-Denmark 2 has created a whopping 14 parts per team member, they must have spent day and night in the lab the last year!

So what about the tracks? Well, let’s just answer that one with a pie-chart, where You can see how the European teams are distributed in the different tracks. It is not unexpected that “New Application” and “Foundational Advance” are popular tracks, still almost half the European teams this year are competing in these two categories. It’s also interesting to note that “Health and Medicine” has become the smallest category, which is somewhat unexpected given the amount of past contributions in this track. Finally software tools is interesting, not because it is small, but because we aren’t seeing any of the old software teams, both contributions being from rookie teams this year.

 

Out of the 42 teams participating in the European regionals, 15 are competing for the first time. So how did the “old” teams fare in the past years? This graph tells us all about that:

Medal results of the "old" teams from Europe competing in 2011: Gold represents that the team received a gold medal, silver a silver medal, bronze a bronze medal. White means that the team did not participate that year and black means that results are not available yet.

 

We hope You enjoyed our little detour into statistics today – tomorrow we will return to our more standard writing style and post short (!) reviews of the 15 rookie teams that are going to the regionals in Amsterdam.

 

Disclaimer: The statistics that form the basis for our statistical analysis have been personally mined from the teams’ wikis and iGEM homepage and therefore are prone to personal error and misjudgement. The raw data can be found here.