Team:TU Darmstadt/Attributions

Attributions

In February, we had our first team meeting with all team members of 2018 and it took us a lot of research and discussions among ourselves, experts and professors until we decided on the final project topic in March. Over the last 8 months, we contacted and cooperated with innumerable helpful internal and external working groups, companies and other iGEM teams.

The iGEM team TU Darmstadt 2018 wants to extend a heartfelt thank you for your commitment to our project's successful realization. Your generous contribution helped us in realizing our project ideas and we are proud to present you our achievements!

Even though, we did all our research, lab work, wrote every text and implemented every information on our wiki mainly by ourselves, without the expertise and help of Christopher Mühl this Wiki would not look the way it does. He helped our team designer Robin Nikolei to create this webpage and invested many hours into it. For all this work you deserve nothing less as our heart-felt thanks!

Without the support of the working group of Prof. Dr. Warzecha our biology lab and the whole project would not be realizable. The working group provided us with a lab, advice and materials. We especially thank Prof. Dr. Warzecha for being our advisor and investing so much time and effort into our project. You made it possible for us to plan, organize, and carry out our own project. We would like to offer our sincerest thanks to Simone Bartl-Zimmermann for managing our orders and for always supporting us in all our troubles we are having in the lab or by organizing the project. In our daily lab work Elisabeth Bayer helped us with upcoming problems in the lab. For correcting many letters, posters and other innumerous texts, we thank Dr. Agata Staniek.

Biology

The biology lab would like to thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Stein providing us with valuable advice, instruments and materials for protein detection and purification. Once again, Alexander Gräwe was of great assistance for us by supervising us during protein purification with the ÄKTA, one of our key steps, and his kind help with our laboratory difficulties.

In April, we had the possibility to work together with the microbiology course at our university. Sascha Hein, Daniel Degreif and the Professors Dr. Bertl, Dr. Pfeifer and Dr. Simon as well as PD Dr. Kletzin supervised a few members of our team in organizing subprojects. Thanks to DI Dr. Hans Marx from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna we learned through his experiences while working with P. putida. Leon Kraus and Philipp Schönberg helped this sub-team in the lab.

Prof. Dr. Suess supports us with materials and expertise, every year anew. We would like to thank her working group for their support. Also, we would like to thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Cardoso for providing us with antibodies. For borrowing us their electroporator we thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Thiel. Thank you to Brigitte Hehl for always being appreciative and helpful. Also, we would like to thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Rose enabling us to analyze our samples on their HPLC system and especially Dipl.-Ing. Lucas for his advice.

Chemistry

The chemistry group would like to thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Biesalski for providing a working bench in their lab and always advising us in our synthesis plans. Especially, we would like to thank Dr. Ing. Marcus Ott, Dr. Simon Trosien and Dr.-Ing. Sabrina Mehlhase for their advice.

From the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main we thank Prof. Dr. Brenker for providing measurement methods such as Transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscope to proof our production of nanospheres and to analyze these in size. For advice on NMR analysis we thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Thiele and for support with the DLS-spectroscopy we thank the working group of Prof. Dr. Rehahn.

Experts advice and support

We would like to thank Prof. Dr. Kabisch for advising us to contact Prof. Dr. Bornscheuer. Thank you to Prof. Dr. Bornscheuer’s working group and especially to Dr. Böttcher and Vishnu Srinivasamurthy for their advice and for providing us with a duet vector containing our enzymes ADH and CHMO in a balanced expression level.

For their very generous support by sending us their modified S. cerevisiae strain with deletions in the Krebs cycle and the plasmid containing the GLYR1 gene, we thank Dr. Outi Koivistoinen from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. She also gave us valuable advices for experiments and other possibilities for higher a glycolic acid yield.

In September, we visited Evonik Industries. They answered our questions concerning our chemistry part, the synthesis of our polymer, and pointed out upcoming problems in the synthesis we should be taking into consideration. Especially, we thank Prof. Dr. Cardoso, Prof. Dr. Schmitz, Prof. Dr. Kolmar, Prof. Dr. Suess and Prof. Dr. Fessner for their advice at our presentations in front of the biology department and for their general support.

Support from the “old” iGEMers

For advice, good conversations and sharing their experiences, we would like to thank former iGEM team members. A special thank you is for Benjamin Mayer, who has taken care of the IT infrastructure over the years. Together with Maximilian Dombrowsky, he mentored our modeling team, this year. Although Claudia Kreher is no active team member this year, she still agreed to digitalize the methods-collection for the team. Sebastian Barthel, who gave us great support in the beginning, during introduction of the new members to the lab and helped with the project research. He also was one of the co-organizers for the microbiology course in April. Feodor Belov, Clara Sophie Nowak and Isabell Feinauer helped us with lab work, at times. Also, we would like to mention Leon Kraus, Viktoria Schuster and Tim Maier who supported us with their expertise concerning the BioBrick design from prior years, during the project.

Especially, we want to thank our instructor Thea Lotz. Also, the project monitoring by Marietheres Kleuter deserves great appreciation from the whole team. A lot of thanks to Marietheres Kleuter and Ann Schirin Mirsanaye, who organized great presentations and workshops. And many thanks to Patrick Müller and Ann Schirin Mirsanaye for organizing great journal clubs.

Others

Thank you to Lutz Kempf for his pitch-workshop. For providing workshop equipment, thank you to Dr. Vera Bandmann and Michael Sürder.
Thanks to Freepick for sharing free vector images, which helped a lot to create our home-page.

We want to offer a special thank you to Heike Spiekermann and Thomas Steinel for making sure that we were well fed during our Wiki Freeze weekends. It was very yummy!