From 28 to 31 October 2025, a team of 21 students from Brno’s Masaryk University (MUNI) and University of Technology (BUT) took part in the finals of iGEM, the world’s largest and most prestigious synthetic biology competition, held in Paris. The team won the overall victory, taking the Grand Prize in the ‘overgraduate’ category, beating some of the world’s best universities, including Cambridge and Oxford. They also took home three special awards: Best Agriculture Project, Best Plant Synthetic Biology and Best Presentation. This makes the iGEM Brno team the first from the Czech and Slovak Republics to win in the competition’s twenty-year history.
The iGEM Competition
Started in 2004 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the iGEM competition has since grown into a global event with more than 400 teams from over 60 countries participating.
iGEM is not just about theoretical knowledge; the key to success lies in carrying out a real project that helps to solve real problems through synthetic biology, a field in which genes can be ‘programmed’.
The best teams present their projects at the prestigious iGEM Grand Jamboree finals, which attract around 5,000 participants from academia, the biotechnology industry and investment sectors every year.
The competition also facilitates the transition of innovative ideas into practice: start-ups formed from iGEM projects have already received over USD 3 billion in investments.
The IGEM Brno team’s project
“Many farmers in the Czech and Slovak Republics are currently struggling to maintain the profitability of their farms due to rising feed prices, especially for the most expensive component: protein. While soy is the best source of protein, it is also the most expensive”, explained Miroslav Rosputinský, one of the team’s founding members.
“Brazil is currently the world’s largest producer of soybeans, accounting for over 40% of global production. While soybean cultivation and export supports the local economy, it also results in the destruction of millions of hectares of natural ecosystems. The current situation is unsustainable and farmers in Europe and Brazil need a better alternative”, she added.
The IGEM Brno team has found a promising solution: duckweed. The smallest and fastest-growing aquatic plant in the world, it contains the same amount of protein as soybeans and can produce up to three times more biomass in the same area over the same time.
However, growing duckweed would require fundamental changes to farm infrastructure, which poses a risk to farmers. To encourage them to adopt this plant, its productivity would need to be increased further to turn it into a viable crop.
“It’s a process that humanity is familiar with, as all the crops we commonly consume today have undergone thousands of years of breeding”, explained Miroslav.
However, the world cannot wait another thousand years for a new crop. Fortunately, thanks to synthetic biology, we can speed up this process significantly.
Our original goal was to genetically modify duckweed to produce more biomass. However, after consulting with scientists worldwide, we discovered that this process is extremely slow, taking around five months. This would slow down the progress of scientists and companies trying to harness this plant’s potential significantly. Consequently, we decided to approach the problem differently and create tools that would make working with duckweed faster and easier. This will not only benefit us but also the entire scientific community”, explained Matúš Grieš, another of the team’s founding members.
The IGEM Brno team’s work has resulted in a new transformation protocol that shortens the genetic modification process of duckweed from five months to one month.
The team also developed an autonomous, vertical, modular cultivation system controlled via a mobile application, a system that saves researchers hours of monotonous work.
The students also successfully isolated and characterised entirely new gene regulatory regions directly from duckweed. This means that future genetic modifications will be compatible with upcoming European legislation on new genomic techniques (NGTs). As plants modified in this way will not contain foreign genes or regulatory sequences they can be cultivated as genetically unmodified crops.
Through a series of experiments, the team obtained data on the most effective methods of growing and harvesting duckweed. They then used this knowledge to create a computational model that suggests optimal conditions and settings for any type of cultivation experiment.
The result of their efforts was the "Duckweed Toolbox": a set of tools and protocols that will enable scientists, future iGEM teams and biotechnology companies to work more effectively with duckweed and further develop its potential.
How did the competition finals in Paris go?
Prior to the final, a five-person jury studied the team’s project in detail based on a presentation video and wiki page. Based on this evaluation, the judges selected the IGEM Brno team as one of the two best projects in the ‘overgraduate’ category, earning them the opportunity to present their project on the main stage on Friday.
“On the last day of the finals, a jury of over 200 people watched our presentation video, after which we answered questions for ten minutes. Following the presentations, the judges voted for the category winner, with Brno being announced the winner on stage. Second place went to last year’s undergraduate category winners, iGEM Heidelberg”, explained Matěj Zámečník, the third founding member of the team, while describing the day’s events.
The final programme also included a project presentation at a booth, where the team could meet and discuss the project with the judges, members of other teams and representatives of partner companies.
How was the team formed?
The IGEM Brno team was formed in November 2024. Following their success at the iGEM Startup Showcase that year, the three founders selected a further 18 of the best students from MUNI and BUT to help them bring their idea to life. The team started working in laboratories and workshops at the beginning of January 2025. Altogether, they have spent a total of around 21,000 hours working on the project.
What will happen next?
Several team members will continue to work on the project for their theses. They also aim to transfer the process to the commercial sphere while also demonstrating potential applications of ‘programmable duckweed’ in different areas of biotechnology.
Media contact:
Zdenka Vilhanová, IGEM Brno team member
vilhanova.igembrno@gmail.com, +421 951 587 262
You can find the IGEM Brno team’s Instagram profile here: @igem_brno
As part of its retreat, the Learned Society of the Czech Republic, in cooperation with our Department of Experimental Biology at the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, organized two events for the general public.
DTPA invites you to a public lecture marking the centenary of quantum mechanics by Subhroneel Chakrabarti. The lecture will take place on December 3rd at 6 p.m. in lecture room F1.
