The iGEM Trento Team is real.

It's the dawn of a new era.
//Presentation day, advisors, applications, selection
After sending our applications, we, the iGEM Trento Team members for 2012, have been selected among the thousands.

First Meeting

The first meeting was on date. We were all:

We decided to start with some brief presentation of previous works, splitting them by category. The meeting is adjourned to the next week.

Previous iGEM works

We resumed from last week session with the previous works.
Jason talked about the food-related projects.
He spoke of last year "Best Food" winner, an interesting project from Yale about an insect antifreeze protein. Olivier knows about this protein and has the proper instrumentation in his lab for further characterization.
Then the John Hopkins Instutute (2010 "Best Food"). They propose to put vitamins in bread via baker's yeast.. what about beer and grappa?
We were browsing through other projects, and the first ideas began to pop out: bacteria that produces flavors of food (Vanillina)
Sheref read an interesting article about cocoa plantation and how they are being destroyed by a fungus. What about producing cocoa or protect the plantations from fungi?
We talked about Miraculina, a peptide without taste that gives sweetness to food ingested afterward. This could turn out to be interesting.
And again, why not to modify the taste of beer and drugs so that people don't want to use them anymore?

Daniele (aka Ross) is not a Mac user, can you tell? He spoke about Energy projects. An idea is to couple photosynthesis with energy production.

And this is Giacomo, while he tells us about the "Best Manufacturing" prize winners.

We also talked about trying to talk to local farmers about the challenges in the Trentino area. Does anybody know people working into apple/milk/meat/wine production?

Some of us had a lab session to attend, so the others would continue next week.

Jason proposed Wunderkit as a team management/sharing ideas tools, and the team is trying to get on with it. It seems to work for the purpose, even if it's still in beta.

We met on Friday to continue with the remaining previous years presentations. [...]
Sheref and Cristina spoke about synthetic biology and the basic things the students needed to know about BioBricks. Cristina had made brownies the previous week, so Daniele (to keep up with the competion) brought Tiramisù. We're still not sure if he had any part in making it.

Cristina and Sheref went to the US for two weeks, so the team met without advisors.

The meeting was a brainstorming session, where some ideas were exploited and new were added. Each member chose a something for further research. //Dropbox folder, blackboard photo