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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.
