iGEM Brno, the team of young talents from Brno, brings home the main prize in the Overgraduate category of the prestigious biotechnology competition iGEM 2025 in Paris. In addition to the main award, their project, which pushes the boundaries of synthetic biology, also won awards for the best agricultural project, the best synthetic plant biology, the best presentation video, and the Gold Medal. The autonomous cultivation unit for fast-growing duckweed was designed in the laboratories of strojLAB at FME.

"We are extremely happy to share this fantastic news with you. We managed to put the Czech Republic and Slovakia on the map of discoveries that push the boundaries in synthetic biology – we won as the first Czecho-Slovak team in the more than twenty-year history of the iGEM competition," the students shared the news on the Donio platform, where they managed to raise over three hundred thousand crowns in a crowdfunding campaign. The money helped them leave for Paris as prepared as possible. "The victory was based on the details, which we were able to fine-tune thanks to you. This achievement would not have been possible without your support. Thank you for being part of our journey to victory – it was an incredible experience for us," the team adds.

The winner was chosen by a jury consisting of more than two hundred members, who were so impressed by Brno students that they even beat teams from such prestigious universities as Oxford or Cambridge. The goal of the iGEM Brno team is to offer farmers an affordable and local source of protein that could replace soy, which currently dominates the sources of protein that farmers use to feed animals, but which has major environmental consequences.

An alternative used in the iGEM Brno concept is duckweed – a fast-growing plant that can be grown in an autonomous cultivation unit, which was created in the workshops of strojLAB of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Technology. The student team worked as an inter-university and multidisciplinary team, using the knowledge of biologists of Masaryk University and engineers of BUT.

You can read an interview with Pravoslav Žilka, a FME student who was part of the team, here.

iGEM is a prestigious international student competition focused on synthetic biology. Founded at MIT in 2003, it has since attracted tens of thousands of participants (currently over 80,000 students from more than 65 countries in about 4,500 teams). Teams create their own biotechnology projects during the summer and present them at the world finals in the fall.

Congratulations to the entire iGEM Brno team!