Team:Goettingen/News deu

25. September 2012, BioBricks are on their way!
It is done. The BioBricks are sent to America´s iGEM head quarter! Say good-bye to good old Germany. Wish you the best. Have fun with you new users :D.

13. September 2012, 13 days to go ...
As the deadline is coming closer we now have to start to produce the figures necessary for our results part. We decided to meet twice during each week to be able to discuss everything fast and effective. In order to not reduce your anticipation (and because it will not be very interesting) we will not summarize the following meetings but of cause we will keep you updated as soon we have interesting news!

07. September 2012, Unser Informationsabend "Legoland für Naturwissenschaftler" findet heute im ZHG der Universität Göttingen statt.
Alle Informationen finden Sie hier.

06. September 2012, Only one day left until the information evening "Legoland for scientists"...
In today’s meeting we only had one topic: our information evening on the following day. We discussed the presentations about iGEM, our projects and the introduction of our speakers and afterwards simulated the discussion. Everybody is very nervous but it will be fun for sure!

30. August 2012, Die erste Version von "Flash Coli - das Spiel" ist nun online!
Flash coli benötigt IHRE Hilfe die schrecklichen Phagen zu bekämpfen. Klicken Sie hier, um zu spielen.

25. August 2012, Heute ist der "Synthetische Biologie"-Tag in Deutschland.
Was ist los? Lesen Sie mehr hier.

15. August 2012, In unserem wöchentlichen Seminar hat uns Anna heute ein Beispiel aus einem Journal zur Synthetischen Biologie vorgestellt.

08. August 2012, Umfrage: Bereit befragt zu werden?
Today we worked further on the survey and it looks like it will be finished soon! Alike the homepage is finally taking form and we started to translate the texts into German to provide also interested citizens the possibilty to inform themselves about our project.
Since our new strains still do not swim as predicted, we planned to write an email to Prof. Parkinson, the person who generated the MG strain, and ask for advice. Group 1 and 2 are still working together to test the swimming ability of the strains with the new inserts. Group 3 faces some problems with the mutation library.

01. August 2012, Ali und Sandra haben Vorträge im Rahmen unseres wöchentlichen Meetings gehalten.
Today was the first time we met before the general meeting and thus were able to discuss a lot of different topics, like human practice and the participation of an "intern", a student from a lower semester, who is very interested in our work. Due to the fact that we still did not find another sponsor, Anna, Bianca and Simon proposed the team for the "Preis des Stiftungsrates" of the university.
Because our strains only show movement after three days of incubation, we had requested the strains RP 437 and MG from labs working with these. Now we can start testing them in our assay! Afterwards we started to discuss a few possible targets for our mutated Tar receptor.

After the official meeting we listened to two presentations. Ali´s paper had the title: "Engineering microbes to sense and eradicate Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a human pathogen" (Saeidi N., et al., 2011) and presented an example of a synthetic biology based system to inhibit biofilm formation of P. aeruginosa. Saeidi et al. engineered E. coli to produce a bacteriocin, an antimicrobial peptide and a lysing enzyme, which lyses the E. coli cell as response to the quorum sensing molecule AHL, secreted by P. aeruginosa. They were able to show that through this system an eradication of P. aeruginosa in vitro was possible. Thank you Ali, for your inspirational talk!
Sandra presented to us the review "Synthetic Biology: Integrated Gene Circuits"(Nagarajan Nandagopal and Michael B. Elowitz, 2012). In general a signal activates specific signaling cascades but synthetic biology theoretically enables us to "create" signaling pathways with outputs of our choice. The possible methods are "functional replacement", "integrated synthetic circuits" and "rewiring". In addition, she explained the mechanism of chemotaxis. Thank you, for your interesting talk!

19. August 2012, "Human practice task force" gegründet!
Due to the fact that the human practice project takes up a lot of our general meeting time, we decided today that the "human practice task force" will now meet at another time. Additionally, we will now meet every Wednesday before the general meeting to discuss dry lab work, for example the homepage. To remove the problem that our strains only start to swim after three days of incubation, group 1 decided to ask for other strains in other labs.

12. Juli 2012, Heute hat Christian in unserem wöchentlichen Meeting etwas über den europäischen "Teacher meet-up" in Paris erzählt.
In today's meeting we had some guests: Christian, a PhD student workin in Heinz´ group and Miguel, an intern, who participated in the iGEM competition last year and won a silver medal with his team! Christian told us about the European teacher meet up and gave us a lot of advises regarding human practice. We are very thankful for their help! Regarding human practice, we decided to discard the idea of the open day as most of the former iGEM projects seem to be hard to copy in a short time. Instead we will now organize a city wide survey to the topic of synthetic biology and a panel discussion with the same topic in which the survey results will be presented and discussed.
Group 1 determined the strain with the fastest movement but movement can only be detected after three days of incubation and no difference between the various promotors for the inserts can be observed. But luckily this is not the case for the Tar inserts! They showed a promotor dependent movement towards tryptone. Group 2 has selected 5 different genes and is now cloning them into the BioBrick vector. Group 3 finished the first round of mutations, but since the yield was very small they will repeat the process.

04. Juli 2012, Es werde Licht!
We now have a light microscope in our lab! Now we will be able to determine whether our strains move at all. Group 1 observed directed movement in other strains and is now trying to find out which strain and which promotor is the most suitable for our project. Group 2 will now start selecting other proteins whose overexpression could enhance the swimming ability and clone them into a vector. Group 3 is still working on the mutagenesis of the Tar receptor. Jan had an additional idea for human practice: a radio podcast!

28. Juni 2012, Anna, Corinna and Erik haben am dritten, jährlichen Kongress für geplante Prozesse "Biotechnology 2020+" in Berlin teilgenommen.
Wie war es? Lesen Sie mehr hier.

26. Juni 2012, E. coli Stamm beflügelt!
Gruppe 1 findet endlich einen Stamm, der gerichtete Bewegung zeigt!

21. Juni 2012, Unser erstes Posterdesign ist fertig.
Today we again talked about human practice projects. The newest idea is to plan an open day and invite students from lower semesters and pupils. In order to promote the idea of synthetic biology, we decided to find suitable projects from the last year and present them to our guests. However, it seems that a panel discussion combined with a survey to the topic synthetic biology will work best, as the summer school holidays are right now.
Group 1 decided to try a new minimal agar for the swimming assays and group 2 is now planning an RT-PCR to study the influence of the different promotors on the expression of FlhDC. Group 3 currently has some personal shortage because Ali and Anna have an internship next week but luckily group 1 and 2 offered to help out. This group will soon start with the mutation library of the Tar receptor!

13. Juni 2012, Herausforderung: Finde ein Human practice-Project!
In today´s meeting, we mainly discussed ideas for human practice projects. All of them will require quite an organizational effort! Additionally, we decided to ask Mr. Dr. Hoppert whether he could help us to make some electron microscopic pictures of our strains. Since we have been invited to present a poster at the third annual congress for strategy processes "Biotechnology 2020+", we also discussed some ideas for its design.
Group 1 still faces some problems with the agar but will start with chemotaxis assays in the next week. Group 2 successfully cloned FlhDC behind eight different promotors and group 3 managed the same for the Tar receptor.

06. Juni 2012, Thomas Maschner, iGEM-Teamleiter der LMU München, hat uns besucht.
Today Heinz told us that he was able to organize a computer for our lab! This will surely facilitate the labwork. He also organized a meeting with Thorsten Maschner from the LMU Munich for tomorrow. Additionally, we decided to ask the sequencing laboratory of the university whether they could support us through sequencing our created vectors.
Afterwards followed as usual the presentations of the group results and the discussion of the next steps. As group 1 has some problems with the swimming assay, we decided to test some different conditions like, e.g. inoculation of the plates with different culture volumes and low nutrition media. Group 2 cloned our constructs into different vectors and they are planning to sequence them. Group 3 successfully completed the first QuikChange PCR!

01. Juni 2012, Diskussion der ersten Laborergebnisse.
As no important organizational matter was needed to be discussed, we mainly talked about the results of the labwork of the different groups. Group 1 will now start the screening of the transformants of group 2 for enhanced mobility. Group 2 will further analyze different promoter-vector combinations. Group 3 is now ready to perform the QuikChange PCR!
After the meeting we discussed the paper from Looger et al., 2003, Nature. In this paper they used a structure based computational method to redesign receptor-ligand binding. If we had the software this method would be beneficial for us, too!

15. Mai 2012, Unser erstes Gruppenbild wurde gemacht!
Lernen Sie uns, unsere Betreuer und Unterstützer kennen! Klicken Sie dazu auf das Bild.

11. Mai 2012, Das iGEM Team Göttingen ist im Göttinger Tageblatt!
Wie dies? Lesen Sie mehr darüber hier.

04. Mai 2012, KWS SAAT AG ist nun Head Sponsor.

02. Mai 2012, Heute hat Anna unser neues iGEM Logo präsentiert.
Anna präsentierte ihre Designs für das Logo unseres iGEM Teams. Wir mochten diese sehr! Auf unserer Homepage können Sie nun das Design mit den meisten Stimmen bewundern.

30. April 2012, Wir haben heute zum ersten Mal das Labor am Max Planck Campus inspiziert.
Today we had the first lab inspection with Steffen Frey after their so called "demolab" achieved the S1 security status! We are very thankful that the MPI allows us to use it for our project and for all the material support they give us. After the inspection Steffen gave us an S1 security instruction and we discussed some points concerning the undisturbed labwork flow. For some unexpected problems concerning the topic of borrowing equipment of the university without working on the university´s grounds had occurred, Heinz equipped us with some material and we were able to pour the first swimming agar plates!

26. April 2012, Wöchentliches Meeting: PCR-Präsentation von Heinz
In this meeting Simon presented to us the special iGEM requirements, e.g. the structure of the parts that are handed in and told us about the iGEM distribution kit which should arrive soon. For Mrs. Ute Ludwig, the person responsible for the equipment in the practical courses at the university, kindly granted all our wishes regarding the lab supplies, we discussed the transport of the material. For money is another important factor for efficient work, Erik gave us a short overview with his progresses in finding further sponsors.
Today Heinz gave us a theory lesson about different PCR methods (e.g. QuikChange PCR), adjustable factors and primer design. It was really interesting and helpful to hear about this method from the point of view of a person working in the lab and not just in some theoretical lecture. Afterwards, we discussed the possible applications of the different methods in our project.

19. April 2012, Das iGEM Team Göttingen 2012 ist nun komplett!
Heute war das erste Treffen des gesamten finalen iGEM Team Göttingens! Heinz stellte erneut das Thema allen neuen Mitgliedern vor und beschrieb kurz die Herausforderungen jeder der drei Gruppen, in die das Projekt eingeteilt wird. Dann präsentierte uns Erik unseren ersten Sponsor: die Firma Sartorius StedimBiotech! Wir sind alle sehr dankbar, dass sie unser Projekt mit 5000 € unterstützen! Danach diskutierten wir organisatorische Aufgaben wie das Laborbuch, Beschaffung von Geldmitteln, Wikieinträge und benötigte Software. Um die tatsächliche in unserem Labor am MPI starten zu können, wurde eine Liste für weiteres Equipemnt und Zubehör erstellt. Corinna und Berit werden das Universitätslager nach den zusätzlichen Material fragen.

04 April 2012, Sartorius Stedim Biotech GmbH ist nun Premium Sponsor.