Trinity On Tour
Monschau
Our first common journey with the team led us to the small resort town Monschau in the Eifel region of western Germany. For the weekend from the 2nd to 4th of March we stayed in the castle of Monschau for team building purposes. We traveled with bus and train via Aachen to Monschau. During the ride it started snowing which is why it we were granted a wonderful view at our arrival. We had to walk through the snow-covered city up to the castle late at night and met a man dressed as a medieval guard soldier, who explained us the quickest way to the castle. The next morning we held our first team building exercise in the castle, guided by one of our advisors. The aim was to estimate our own strengths and thing about the area of responsibility in which we can use our abilities the most. It started with a little game about ourselves. We made a poster with different important characters in a team like “planner and manager” or “creator” and everyone listed themselves under one or more categories. Then we asked for every person how the team members would categorize this person and if they agree with the self-assessment. After lunch we explored snowy Monschau in daylight, took pictures together and looked for souvenirs. Back at the hostel we met again to hold our next seminar connecting to our previous one. Now we started to plan the structure of our team and decided that it is beneficial to have three main coordinators for our “trinity” with three different tasks: a team leader, a social-media-representative and a laboratory-manager. After the hard part our advisor had planned some games for us with the main focus on communication. The first is called “Gordian Knot” where we all stood in a circle and had to grab two random hands. Then the challenge was to unknot everyone without letting go of the hands in order to rebuild the circle. The next game was a bit more difficult. We divided the team into 4 groups and decided on a leader in each group. Each member of each group got different cards from a normal card-set and we had to sort them in a specific way. During the game we were not allowed to speak and only the leader knew the task we had to do. We were only allowed to communicate with little notes, which was not easy for us. The team who used the fewest number of notes won the game. In the evening hunger overcame us and led us to an Italian restaurant overlooking the half-frozen river “Rur“. Our last evening in Monschau was completed with a cozy get-together with card games. The next day, after breakfast, we set out home after a successful, wonderful weekend in the Eifel.
Mosbacher Kolloquium
69. Mosbacher Kolloquium - "Synthetic Biology - from Understanding to Application"
The GBM "Gesellschaft für Biochemie und Molekularbiologie e. V." in English "Society for biochemistry and molecular biology" (e. V. = registered society/association) welcomed us to their annual colloquium of Mosbach "Mosbacher Kolloquium". The 69th colloquium was titled "Synthetic Biology - from Understanding to Application". The scientific organizers of the Mosbach Colloquium 2018 were Victor Sourjik (Marburg), Anke Becker (Marburg), Wilfried Weber (Freiburg) and one of our professors, Matias Zurbriggen (Dusseldorf). The Mosbacher Kolloquium is an opportunity to establish contacts, to find orientation in the research landscape or to receive detailed technical knowledge for your own projects. It’s for students of every stage of education since there is something for everyone. We were fortunate enough to have formed a carpool with students from the jGBM ("Junior GBM") who gave us valuable tips about the colloquium.
Of course, the main focus were the science talks: One interesting talk was by Hannah Wagner from the University of Freiburg, who synthesized a positive feedback loop with molecular switches. Mustafa Khammash from the ETH Zurich spoke about the application of optogenetics in synthetic biology and provided the Mosbach Colloquium with several posters about his research, which were represented at the poster sessions. The general take-home-message was that synthetic biology is the chance to understand what life is. As Nobelist (1965) Richard Feynman said:
“What we cannot create, we do not understand.”
In addition to the science talks, a get-together "Get to know iGEM" was organized for current and former iGEM participants and interested parties. iGEM Hamburg, iGEM Marburg and former participants of iGEM Darmstadt among others attended.
We discussed how to establish the iGEM competition in an university and were given advice on conflict counseling in the team and on sponsorship. We also motivated those interested to apply for their university iGEM-team next year or even to form an iGEM team themselves.
VAAM Wolfsburg
Since it’s a long established custom that iGEM Bielefeld and iGEM Düsseldorf come together for a small meet up, we continued this tradition and invited the team of iGEM Bielefeld to Düsseldorf.
After a long train ride and a few delays due to the Deutsche Bahn five Bielefelder finally arrived out of nowhere at our Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf.
After we let them glance through the windows of our laboratory, we quickly made our way into the iGEM room to discuss our project and similar problems while eating delicious cake and other snacks.
It quickly became clear that not only our humor matches but also our interest in science.
Armed with a crate of beer we started our tour of the Botanical Garden of our university that was actually led by Levin from Bielefeld who somehow knew more about the park than we did.
When the sun became clouded we quickly headed back to the iGEM room where we started our famous team building Gordian knot game.
At the beginning all players stand up in a circle, stretch their right hand in the middle and randomly grab another hand. Then the left hand follows until everyone is holding two hands. Then the real challenge starts - to untie the Gordian knot! We tried to untangle everyone for about 45min until we realized that we had terribly failed. I’m sure it wasn’t our fault though since we were still heavily trained from our Burg Monschau event.
After the big loss our heavy hearts craved some comfort food (we recommend pizza with sauce hollandaise, white asparagus and ham and we decided on an easier game: Werewolves.
This game is a role play and takes places in a town in which several unknown werewolves strike terror into its inhabitants hearts by killing random people. Each round the residents are allowed to execute one person in the hope of getting rid of the werewolves. With the help of some special characters, we actually did it! Encouraged by our success we started our last tour for the day into the “Altstadt” of Düsseldorf. The Old Town of Düsseldorf is widely known for its many bars next door to one another which is why it’s also called the “longest bar in the world”. What is only known to most residents of Düsseldorf though is a special shot called “Stress”. The name is program as it is loaded with many hot spices like pepper, tabasco etc and of course we had to introduce it to the team of iGEM Bielefeld. Thankfully everyone survived. After this everyone was treated with “Altbier” - an traditional beer brewed in Düsseldorf.
Tiredly everyone went home and four of the team members set their bed for the night in Carina’s 15m2 (150 square foot) room. It was crowded to say the least…
but well worth it!
After a successful and fun stay the Bielefelder iGEMers were guided to their train in the morning and went back to Bielefeld, probably to catch up on their sleep.
...and they lived happily ever after.
Lab Supply Frankfurt at the Main
We visited the Lab Supply trade fair in Frankfurt on the Main to initialize the contact to different exhibiting companies and to talk about our project.
The Lab Supply is a trade fair for laboratory machines and supply held in different locations in Germany throughout the year. Next to many exhibitions, the trade fair also allures many people because of its talks.
For the three of us it started as a big challenge to walk up to different exhibiting companies. As it was our first time on such an event we were mortified to ask them for help, supplies or even money. But this fear quickly faded as the exhibitors reacted positively to our project ideas and offered us their help. One offer included the nanophotometer as unit of loan from the company Implen, which later on helped us a lot during growth curve measurements and mini preps. It even has a vortexer!
A problem we encountered was that most of the exhibiting companies had attendants at their booth that were only responsible for a specific region. Since Düsseldorf is a 2h ride away (which is a lot in Germany) and is located in a different state, the people usually had to refer us to a different, more relevant contact of their company.
At the Lab Supply trade fair, several talks were offered. We joined the talks about autoclaving and pipetting. Thus, we learned about the different sorts of autoclaving systems and their function and advantages. Afterwards, we learned how different kinds of pipettes function and how to handle them right in the lab to prevent diseases caused by wrong pipette handling.
Besides all that, we met the iGEM teams of Marburg and Bielefeld for the first time and had the chance to talk about our projects and the experiences with sponsoring.
It was especially interesting for us newbies to talk to one of the members who had participated in the iGEM competition before.
All in all, the Lab Supply was a big success and we gained very valuable insights.
VAAM Wolfsburg
Due to the annual conference of the association for general and applied microbiology, our member Miriam, our advisors Kai, Anna, Max and Nic and our PI Jun.-Prof. Dr. Ilka Maria Axmann visited the congress. Since the congress assembles scientists from several subcategories of microbiologists, microbiology scientists offered a huge variety of research at the congress. Thus, famous researchers like Harald Engelhardt from the Max Planck Institute of biochemistry presented the microbe of the year lactobacillus and Joakim Larsson from the department of infectious diseases at the institute of biomedicine in Gothenburg showed the environmental dimensions of antibiotic resistance.
We attended several talks of renowned researchers from biotechnology, environmental microbiology, symbiotic interactions, fungal biology, microbial cell biology and gene regulation. Especially the talks concerning co-cultures offered interesting insights like the research of Hannes Löwe from TU München, who co-cultivated Pseudomonas putidae and Synechococcus elongatus (cscB strain from Daniel Ducat) for efficient production of bioplastics. As we also want to take advantage of a sucrose over-producing cyanobacteria strain the research of Hannes Löwe showed us an optional product of our co-culture. In addition to that, we listened to talks which involved parts of our project. Therefore, we visited the talk of Katja Bettenbrock from MPI Magdeburg who used the glf importer of Zymomonas mobilis in Escherichia coli and tested if the type and capacity of glucose transport influences succinate yield and productivity in two-phase cultivations. Since we use glf as an exporter in S. elongatus, Katja Betterbrock’s talk showed us an interesting usage in E. coli.
At the Microbe Slam, we met the iGEM team of Hamburg. During this event, several students and researchers presented their work and combined it with poetry and humor. Jens Rudat from the institute of technology in Karlsruhe, who was the winner of this years’ Microbe Slam, explained what bacteria in space might have in common with caffeine, while Wael Yakti from Leibniz-institute of vegetable and ornamental crops in Berlin narrated the epic battles of fungi in environmental co-cultures.
Since there were several companies at the congress, we approached them and talked about methods and products we could involve in our project. Macherey-Nagel gave us a huge variety of kits to isolate DNA from organisms that are hard to break down and Zymo research offered us kits for isolation of plasmid and genomic DNA from bacteria. Both were used to isolate genomic DNA to amplify specific genes in our project.
Additional to that, all of our advisors and our member who participated in the congress presented a poster concerning their latest research. Thus, Miriam presented the results of her bachelor thesis concerning toehold switches in cyanobacteria, Kai showed his latest outcome in unconventional secretion of Ustilago maydis, Max presented his biotechnological work on triterpenes in cyanobacteria and Nic held a poster talk concerning the origin of the circadian clock and the earth-moon system. As our PI Jun.-Prof. Ilka Maria Axmann participated in the congress, too, she held a talk concerning the diversity of timing systems in bacteria and gave a short overview over the circadian clock in cyanobacteria.
As a huge variety of researchers visited the congress, it was interesting to establish contact with different microbiologists.