Student teams are given a kit (so called ‘Distribution Kit’) of standard, interchangeable parts (so called 'BioBricks') at the beginning of the summer from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts comprising various genetic components such as promoters, terminators, reporter elements, and plasmid backbones.

Successful projects produce cells that exhibit new and unusual properties by engineering sets of multiple genes together with mechanisms to regulate their expression.

10 categories), 'Best Art & Design', 'Best Hardware', 'Best Measurement', 'Best Software', 'Best Human Practices', 'Best Model', 'Best New Part', 'Best Poster', 'Best Presentation', 'Best Wiki' and others depending on the competition year.

[5] Randy Rettberg, an engineer who has worked for technology companies including Apple, Sun and BBN,[6] is the founder and president of iGEM.

[7] Regional jamborees occurred during October; and some subset of teams attending those events were selected to advance to the World Championship at MIT in November.

[8] In January 2012 the iGEM Foundation was spun out of MIT as an independent non-profit organization located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

For their tenth anniversary, iGEM added new tracks to the existing ones: Art & Design, Community Labs, Entrepreneurship, Measurement, Microfluidics, Policy & Practice, and Software.

Starting in 2022, the event was redesigned and rebranded to the iGEM Grand Jamboree, held in the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles.

Beyond just building biological systems, broader goals of iGEM include: iGEM's dual aspects of self-organization and imaginative manipulation of genetic material have demonstrated a new way to arouse student interest in modern biology and to develop their independent learning skills.