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Attributions

Project timeline

The majority of support we received in the planning and implementation of our project came of course from our PIs and instructors. There was an iGEM course held at BOKU, which ran over the course of the summer term. The team members were selected at the beginning of January, right after Christmas break and the course started properly in late February of 2018. In the course each of our instructors gave a lecture on one of the topics we would need for the work on our project. In parallel to the lectures from our instructors the iGEM course was also the setting in which we did most of our brainstorming as a group and decided on a project to pursue. We settled on a project around mid-March and started our lab-work at the beginning of July.

Planning Support

Hans Marx, PhD introduced us to golden-gate cloning and showed us how to design parts ourselves. Prof. Brigitte Gasser taught us about the possibilities of genetic logic gates and genetic circuits. Dr. Jürgen Zanghellini showed us how to go about creating a model and helped us with refining ours. Prof. Michael Sauer did a lecture on the many considerations that make up human practices, from bioethics over safety considerations and risk analysis to identifying stakeholders and their concerns. Prof. Diethard Mattanovich introduced us to the basics of project management and made some suggestions on how we could organize ourselves. Prof. Alexandra Graf was our contact for the Wiki and any other informatics questions, but since we have a seasoned programmer and web-designer on our team we didn’t really need any help in that regard. In general all of these lectures were meant to give us the tools to be able to plan and design our project by ourselves, though of course our instructors were always available to us when we had questions and gave us further advice during both the planning and lab-work stages of our project. One source of support from outside our team of instructors was Prof. Iris Eisenberger who provided support in legal questions and identified potential legal problems our system would encounter in a real world application.

Lab support

In our work with plants we were supported by Dr. Sascha Waidmann a postdoc at BOKU who works in the field of plant biotechnology and with whom we had our first meeting at the end of April. He provided us with Arabidopsis seeds and Agrobacterium and showed us how to grow and transform our plants. His working group, which is led by Prof. Jürgen Kleine-Vehn provided the incubation room for us to grow them. During our lab work we were mainly supported by our PIs Prof. Diethard Mattanovich and Hans Marx,PhD who regularly checked on us and made suggestions when we ran into problems. Stefanie Wiesauer ordered our lab materials for us and was very nice about lending us things when we failed to order them in time and also showed us how to use the Nanodrop for measuring DNA concentrations.Prof. Brigitte Gasser showed us how to use the plate reader and Thomas Gaßler, MSc showed us how to use the fluorescence microscope and gave us the protocols we used when working with Pichia pastoris. Dominik Jeschek, Dipl.-Ing. helped us with producing liposomes. For our cooperation with the iGEM Team Stockholm Bernhard Schmelzer, Dipl.-Ing. provided backbones, primers and the template for the alpha factor. Franziska Doleschal and Birgit Marckhgott were responsible for handling our money. Prof. Michael Sauer also helped us establish communication with the ÖGMBT (Austrian Association of Molecular Life Sciences and Biotechnology), which helped us realise our crowdfunding campaign and allowed us to present our project with a poster at their annual meeting. Additionally we would like to thank the whole Sauer working group who occupied the lab next to ours and were always helpful when we had minor questions. They also invited us along to play laser tag with them, which provided a nice break from our lab work. Another group without whom our work in the lab would not have been possible is the cleaning staff responsible for the labs of the Sauer working group who were responsible for deactivating our contaminated waste and cleaning our glassware.