Two students from our laboratory, Feriel Mélaïne and Robin Pinilla, belong to the joint UJF/Grenoble-INP team nominated for the 2011 iGEM world championship jamboree to be held in Boston (USA) on November 5-7. Grenoble team was competing with its project "Mercuro-coli", an innovative biosensor for mercury quantification (Link). It was ranked among the 18 (of 50) nominated European teams.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. Student teams are given a kit of biological parts at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. Working at their own schools over the summer, they use these parts and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.

For the Europe Regional Jamboree in Amsterdam (October 1-2), Grenoble was competing with Insa/ENS Lyon, Paris Fondation Bettencourt, ENSPS Strasbourg, Imperial College London (UK), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), KU Leuven (Belgium)... In Boston, there will be 26 American teams (nominated among 59) and around 20 Asian teams (of 46).