On 6 September members of the FABI community attended and presented work at the African Center for Gene Technologies (ACGT) Synthetic Biology Symposium at the African Pride Irene Country Lodge. The 2016 Pretoria_UP iGEM team , hosted by the Forest Molecular Genetics (FMG) programme in FABI, delivered an update of their WattsAptamer project which will be presented to iGEM judges at the 2016 Giant Jamboree in Boston, USA in October. Lazarus Takawira , a PhD candidate in FMG, also presented his work on high-throughput transcriptional networks re-construction in Eucalyptus through gene synthesis, in vitro transcription and DAP-seq. Prof. Geoff Baldwin , Reader in Biochemistry at Imperial College London, delivered a plenary lecture at the event on his cutting-edge work on the development of new standard assembly approaches in synthetic biology and high-throughput construct design and testing platform. Photo: The Pretoria_UP iGEM team presenting their WattsAptamer project at the ACGT Synthetic Biology Symposium. Image credit: Farhahna Allie