SynBERC students from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley were among the finalists in this year's International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) Competition, sponsored by SynBERC and hosted at MIT. Of the 57 teams from universities around the world, UCSF and UCB were selected as two of only 6 finalists. The feat was all the more amazing since the two teams were composed all or in part of high school students, whereas their competitors were mostly undergraduate students. The UCSF team, composed entirely of biotechnology students from Lincoln High School in San Francisco, designed a “synthesome”, an artificial cellular organelle to house biological factories. The UC Berkeley team, composed of undergraduates and an experimental sub group of two high students and their teacher, designed "bactoblood", a blood substitute that could be freeze-dried. The iGEM program develops high school and undergraduate students’ skills and confidence as research scientists, develops graduate students’ skills in mentoring and teaching, exposes US student researchers to researchers from around the world, and furthers the goals of the synthetic biology community by increasing open-source resources.

More about SynBERC iGEM teams:
NY Times: English, Algebra, Phys Ed ... and Biotech
San Francisco Chronicle: High school biowizards break new ground in winning competition
UCSF Today: UCSF's all-high school team