Team:Goettingen/News

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, We organized the "Legoland for Scientists" symposium at the University of Göttingen.
Read everything about it here.

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, The first version of "Flash Coli - the game" is now online.
Flash coli needs YOUR help to fight the horrible phages. Click here to play.

25 August 2012, Today is the "Synthetic Biology" day in Germany!
What is going on? Read more here.

15 August 2012, In our weekly seminar Anna presented an example for Synthetic Biology.

08 August 2012, Survey: Ready to be asked?
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 and Sandra conducted their presentations in our weekly seminar.
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 established!
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 July 2012, In today’s weekly meeting Christian told us about the European teacher meet-up in Paris.
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 July 2012, Let there be light!
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 June 2012, Anna, Corinna and Erik participated in the third annual congress for strategy processes "Biotechnology 2020+".
How was it? Read more here.

26 June 2012, E. coli strain spurred!
Group 1 finally found a strain that shows directed movement!

21 June 2012, Our first poster is designed!
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 June 2012, Task: Find a 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 June 2012, Thomas Maschner, advisor from the iGEM team of the LMU Munich, came to visit us.
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 June 2012, Discussion of the first lab results
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 May 2012, The first picture of our complete team.
Get to know us, our advisors and supporters! Click on the picture.

11 May 2012, iGEM Göttingen is in the local newspaper.
How come? Read more here.

04 May 2012, KWS SAAT AG is now Head Sponsor.

02 May 2012, Today Anna presented our iGEM logo.
Anna presented her designs for the logo of our iGEM team and we liked them a lot! On our homepage you can now admire the design which got the most votes.

30 April 2012, We inspect the laboratory at the Max Planck campus.
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, Weekly meeting: PCR-Lecture from 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, The iGEM team Göttingen 2012 is now complete!
Today was the first meeting with the final lineup of the iGEM team Göttingen! Heinz again introduced the topic to all the new members and shortly described the tasks of each of the three groups the project will be divided in. Then Erik presented to us our first sponsor: the company Sartorius StedimBiotech! We all are very thankful that they support our project with 5000 €! Afterwards we discussed organizational duties like the labbook, fund raising, wiki entries and necessary software. In order to start the actual work in our lab at the MPI, we wrote down a list of further equipment and supplies. Corinna and Berit will ask for the additional material at the universities` store.

04 April 2012, Sartorius Stedim Biotech GmbH is now Premium Sponsor.