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They promised to win – and they did! Students from Brno won an international biotech competition
The iGEM Brno team of young talents has won the Grand Prize in the Overgraduate category at the prestigious biotechnology competition iGEM 2025 in Paris. In addition to the main award, their project pushing the boundaries of synthetic biology also received prizes for Best Agriculture Project, Best Plant Synthetic Biology, Best Presentation Video, and a Gold Medal. The autonomous cultivation unit for growing fast-growing duckweed plants was developed in the strojLAB workshops at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (FSI).
Enormous joy for Brno students. | Author: iGEM Brno “We are thrilled to share this fantastic news with you. We managed to put the Czech Republic and Slovakia on the map of discoveries that push the limits of synthetic biology – we won as the first Czechoslovak team in the more than twenty-year history of iGEM,” the students shared on the Donio platform, where they raised over three hundred thousand Czech crowns in a crowdfunding campaign. The funds helped them go to Paris fully prepared. “Victory came down to details that we were able to fine-tune thanks to your support. This success wouldn’t have been possible without you. Thank you for being part of our journey to victory – it was an incredible experience for us,” the team added.
The iGEM Brno team also collected a number of individual awards. | Author: iGEM Brno The winner was chosen by a jury of more than two hundred members, who were so impressed by the students from Brno and other Czech universities that they managed to surpass even teams from prestigious schools such as Oxford and Cambridge. The goal of the iGEM Brno team is to provide farmers with an affordable and local source of protein that could replace soy. Soy currently dominates the protein sources used in animal feed but carries significant environmental consequences.
Duckweed is the fastest growing plant in the world. | Author: Pravoslav Žilka, iGEM Brno The alternative proposed by iGEM Brno is duckweed – a fast-growing aquatic plant that can be cultivated in an autonomous growth unit developed in the strojLAB workshops at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of Brno University of Technology (BUT). The student team functioned as an inter-university, multidisciplinary group, relying especially on the expertise of biologists from Masaryk University and engineers from BUT.
You can read an interview with FME student Pravoslav Žilka, who was part of the team, here.
Pravoslav Žilka (right) with FSI student Andrej Žabka and FIT graduate Martin Pavell building an autonomous cultivation unit in strojLAB. | Author: Pravoslav Žilka, iGEM Brno 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, with around 4,500 teams). During the summer, teams develop their own biotechnology projects and present them at the world finals in the fall.
