The iGEM competition is an international bioengineering competition among colleges and high schools. IGEM stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine, and is revolved around synthetic biology. It began initially as a college competition, but has just recently moved to the high school level. High schools across the world put together biologically engineered projects in an attempt to solve a particular problem. Our school’s bioengineering team is focused around helping the oysters of the Chesapeake Bay by targeting a specific parasite that infects and kills oysters. The team has been working on their project for the past two years. Because of increasing costs, attending the iGEM competition at MIT is hard for teams to do. As an alternative, some teams across the world decided to organize an online conference. On Saturday, May 21^st, there was a Biotreks virtual conference where high school bioengineering teams posted about their projects, and read about others.

Some bioengineering club advisors met at last year’s iGEM competition at MIT. While they were talking, they realized they wanted to open up the iGEM conference experience to teams that may not be able to afford attending the competition. Teams from Frederick, Virginia, and even Canada participated in the online conference. In Frederick County, Tuscarora, Middletown, and Frederick all participated. Teams had to write academic scientific papers describing their projects. There were two different types of papers teams could write- either research papers or method papers. Research papers describe the entire project, and methods papers go into detailed steps on how to perform different experiments. Teams could also make a video and submit artwork to the online website.

Our school’s team wrote both a research paper and a methods paper, as well as made a video to go along with each. Some students in a computer graphics class worked on creating artwork revolved around the oyster project and on synthetic biology in general. Students met in Ms. Marcum’s room Saturday from 1 to 3 pm. They looked at other school’s projects, answered questions on their own papers, and even video-chatted with judges. You can even check out the papers, videos, and artwork submissions by visiting the following link: https://biotreks.breezio.com/