Participating Teams

iGEM is the largest synthetic biology competition in the world. Synthetic biology is a field in which organisms are redesigned for useful purposes and it has captured the interest of many young researchers. In the competition, student teams are working on designing, building, testing, and measuring a system with which they try to provide a practical solution to a world problem. The problem to be solved could be anything ranging from detecting/treating illness and disease, economizing energy resources or tackling environmental problems.

It is Team IGNITE’s focus to have an impact on society. With our installations, we can show the world the potential of light and how light influences our lives. The installations should show some form of interactivity that creates an experience for the visitors or encourages social impact. As Team IGNITE we aspire to inspire the people around us. We do that in our team through our community as well as through our work which is what outsiders see. We want to stimulate creativity and impactful innovation through our partners, suppliers and manufacturers and eventually in the final work by the pillars of addressing societal challenges, creating a livable earth or creating social awareness.

Our team is trying to solve the problem of executing research on Antarctica. Antarctica is the 5th biggest continent on Earth and conceals many unrevealed mysteries that would illuminate researchers about Earth's past and future. Currently, researchers do their best to understand climate change and the ice melting phenomenon. Although they have one major challenge, which is technology. Currently, the main mean of travel is by using old sherp-type vehicles which are kerosene driven and human controlled. This limits greatly the research possibilities as researchers need to go with multiple trailers full of provisions to reach a further point in the continent. That is the reason why only 25% of the continent is explored.

Marketswiper tries to increase online secondhand sales and improve circularity by making people reuse more.

While the amount of recycling has improved tremendously in the past years, there are still improvements to be made. Knowledge of which trash goes exactly into what bin is not known by everyone.

There is no denying the fact that vehicles make a big dent in the environment, whether it is during manufacturing or running on the roads. However, as a community, we are not yet at the point where people can give up their cars and still fulfil all their mobility needs. But there are some cars out there that are greener than others.

Electric truck manufacturing has recently launched at full rate, which means that in a few years there will be many used batteries that will have reached the end of their first cycle. Currently, there is no strategy to handle these old batteries as they are simply stored in warehouses or sent to a scraper for little to no money. On the other hand, due to the transition to renewable energy, the fast-developing energy storage market also demands a huge number of new batteries every year.

Due to climate change and declining biodiversity, our health and liveability are at stake. Our cities will have to increasingly deal with heat stress, drought, and water issues caused by climate change. In addition, the great reduction in species is harrowing, because biodiversity is crucial for the breakdown of organic waste, plant pollination, and pest prevention, as well as controlling the water cycle and purifying both water and the air we breathe. Local governments and initiatives have been working on bringing more green into the public space, but many Dutch gardens are still fenced and paved, excluding great beauty that nature can bring. How can we make it easy and accessible for everybody to make their gardens more nature-inclusive?

Our Bio-photovoltaic (BPV) cell helps companies that produce low-power input electronic devices that want to have a greener business model and image. This is due to the ever increasing number of IoT devices using unsustainable batteries.

We are addressing the problem of ineffective learning. Students study too much or too little without any tangible learning benefits. As well as this, studying is normally completed without any specific technique or consistence - for instance, many students re-read a textbook several times or highlight notes as their main study method. At Lens, we know that this is not only an ineffective strategy of study, but may as well be one of the worse out there.