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.

A visit from iGEM Bielefeld

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.