Technion Wins MIT iGEM Gold Medal

November 3, 2016 | A team of students from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has won the gold medal in the iGEM international competition held at MIT. This is the third consecutive year that a Technion team has won the gold medal in this competition. iGEM is an international synthetic biology competition, which aims to develop products based on the creation of new biological systems and their operation in living cells.  Contestants must submit a research proposal, carry out an independent study, raise the necessary funding and present their results in the finals. The Technion team’s product that won the gold medal is Flash Lab – an innovative chip for fast, accurate and simple detection of various substances.  The chip is based on chemotaxis – a natural biological process in which bacteria respond to the presence of a specific substance by swiftly moving toward it or away from it, creating clusters of visible bacteria.