Just as Major League Baseball begins its season in April and holds its world championship in October, so it is with the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM), which has been helping to develop the next generation of synthetic biology engineers since its founding at MIT in 2003.When registration closes March 31, iGEM will begin sending to all registered teams a kit of its 2000 most popular ‘BioBricks’ from the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts. That will start a new six-month cycle of designing, building and testing new genetically engineered biological systems. Teams will intensify their work during the spring and into the summer months and reach a crescendo in late October when they’ll convene at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center for iGEM’s Giant Jamboree.More than 100 judges will confer awards in 15 categories, such as energy, environment, food and nutrition, manufacturing and information processing. The judges also will select a grand prize winner, anointing the 2016 world champion of synthetic biology.“We’re creating the workforce of the future,” says Meagan Lizarazo, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for iGEM. “These are the young people who are going to be creating the research programs and startups and leading the companies that are going to be driving the future of synthetic biology.”Integrated DNA Technologies, Inc. (IDT), the global leader in nucleic acid synthesis based in Skokie, IL, will greatly aid this year’s competition by offering each registered student team the equivalent of 20kb of DNA at no charge, a contribution valued at nearly $1 million. That will enable the teams to avoid the painstaking process of building the parts, and instead focus on “imagining, engineering, and testing the novel devices they create to solve important world problems,” said Randy Rettberg, founder, president, and CEO of the iGEM Foundation.Over the years, about 30 iGEM teams have gone on to launch companies. The competition’s biggest success story is Gingko Bioworks, a winning entrant in the early years.In last year’s competition, nearly 300 teams competed from around the world, with about one-third each coming from the Americas, Asia, and Europe and Africa, Lizarazo said. The competition has grown 14 percent in each of the last three years.