Phoenix Project

Mission & Vision

Over the past 17 years, there have been close to 3,000 teams that have participated in the iGEM competition. These teams have proved to both the judges, and the world, that iGEMers are great at building things! The iGEM Competition, and by extension the entire iGEM community, is amazing at the design-build-test cycle. iGEM teams around the world generate hundreds of prototypes of solutions to both local and global problems that have the potential to change the world. Every year a small fraction of these projects continue, either in an academic setting or as a start-up.

Phoenix aims to increase the number of projects that live on beyond their initial iGEM cycle. In this way, we hope that the iGEM community can move forward in making engineering progress on these pressing issues by iterating on each other’s ideas.

One way we hope to accomplish our goal is by making iGEM data more searchable. Phoenix can help you easily find lab notebooks, methodologies and experimental approaches taken by previous iGEM teams that used the same chassis organism or tackled the same problem as you.

We hope to engage the whole iGEM community by recruiting a team of alumni who are passionate to help build a sustainable platform. Together, we will create a system to collect stories and insights from alumni about past projects, and in doing so create new knowledge about what iGEM teams have already accomplished.

Goals

Engineering

Easily searchable iGEM data makes it easier to find past teams that worked on projects similar to yours or to be inspired to pick up where another project left off. We hope to help all teams that want to continue the work of a previous team by connecting teams to the alumni that were on that team, if possible.

Stories

What happened to iGEMers and their projects? We want to tell stories about the incredible journey the iGEM community throughout the years. As we try understanding how teams have evolved over time, we can begin to understand how iGEM has been laying the foundations for the field of Synthetic Biology. We want to hear how iGEM impacted you, and how your project or your experience lived on, in big ways and small. Every iGEMer’s story is an important piece of the iGEM story.

Data

iGEM teams generate tremendous amounts of data. Some of it is captured in a structured way, such as awards won by the team, and others captured in ways such as, a blog post about lessons a team learned in their iGEM journey, and some data remains uncaptured. We aim to make structured iGEM data readily available and easily searchable for teams. We also aim to incorporate more data, that is currently unstructured, over time. We hope to leverage the power of the iGEM community to help fill in the gaps by creating opportunities to add to our database.

The database

This a beta-version of a database we are building that is more searchable and approachable. We encourage you to take some time to explore the database and learn from the iGEMers that came before you.

Below are the team lists from 2004-2020, with team information, locations, abstracts and medals they won. This data is made available through Airtable, an online, collaborative platform for sharing and easily sorting data. You may use the filter button in the top bar to filter the data to only show teams from your country, or track, or both. You can also group and sort the data using those metrics that are important to you! Use the search button to look up keywords from your project and see if iGEM teams have used them in the past.

Reach out now!

Looking for inspiration?

If you want to building off the work of previous teams, reach out to phoenix@igem.org and we would love to try and help connect you!

Project updates

Did your project turn into a company? A research project? We would love to hear about it!

Feedback

We are always looking for ways to improve our database. Share your thoughts and ideas with us.

We are not the first group to explore the world of iGEM data!

iGEM insights

Take a look at the iGEM insights page to learn how the group is using histotical iGEM data to study the science of science, which uses large datasets to understand the mechanisms underlying the practice of science and engineering - from what problems people chose to work on, to the trajectories of the field and the careers of the people within it.

The Matchmaker project

You can also take a look at what teams have been able to build using iGEM data, such as the Matchmaker project from the 2015 NTU Trondheim team. The iGEM Matchmaker used keyword analysis to help match teams with similar projects in order to ease collaboration. Although this project is not currently being maintained, it is an excellent example of what iGEM teams can do!

Coming Soon to Phoenix

Contact previous teams!
Find out what happened to projects after the competition.
Track how projects have evolved over time.
A new user interface for the database!