We helped to organize the action day of all German iGEM teams by writing the press release for all other teams. The idea to arrange a Germany-wide action day was to address people outside the university and attract attention about iGEM and synthetic biology. Besides it was a step to have an "open-science". The people were very pleased to be informed about new approaches because they thought science is mainly behind closed doors. So we tried to change this view a bit, and hopefully it worked. Seven German iGEM teams participated in the action day and organized information booths and activities around synthetic biology.

If you want to read more about this day, take a look on our "Human Practice" page.

Teams that joined the Action Day

• Bielefeld
• Tübingen
• Bonn
• Darmstadt
• Göttingen
• Marburg
• Munich

Action Day

Logo of LMU-Munich iGEM team

The LMU Munich iGEM team joined us on the Action Day. Our team organized the information booth, we organized the permission of the city of Munich, and we payed the fee for it. To get a booth in the city center of Munich is not that easy and costs a lot of time. Besides we organized all the booklets and created a handout to distribute and inform the public. The LMU iGEM team organized the tables and the movable walls so that we had a booth at all.

Mentioned in her Diploma thesis

Jessica Ebner is a student at the University of Stuttgart. She contacted us at a very early stage of the project and asked us whether she could describe the iGEM competition using our team as an example. Her diploma thesis is entitled: "Engineering of Life – What is Synthetic Biology and how does it operate?" She visited us once. We explained our project to her and she received a login to our internal wiki. In her thesis she dedicated ten pages to the iGEM competition and our team.

Abstract

This diploma thesis aims at reflecting the cross-disciplinary field of Synthetic Biology as an emerging engineering technology. Initially this requires a concise analysis of the historical development of the term Synthetic Biology as well as the recent progresses concerning DNA synthesis and sequencing technologies. Furthermore this comprises the exemplification of the engineering based approach to Synthetic Biology. With reference to the several major categories of Synthetic Biology, this thesis theoretically analyzes the distinct areas of focus and specifies those insights with applied-oriented examples. In addition, this work describes the basic principles of the unique International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition and focuses on the importance of an innovative contribution made by the iGEM team of undergraduate students from the Technical University of Munich. Eventually this thesis conducts a critical evaluation of both, the internal strengths and weaknesses of Synthetic Biology and the chances and risks which the synthetic biology community will likely to be faced with.

Part from her thesis

A part for her thesis about synthetic biology and its opportunities can be downloaded - however, it is only in German. Besides she made her final presentation in English available.

Providing our "Original Bavarian Collaboration Medal"

For the response of our [http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B8LZNXQ survey on standardization of BioBrick part descriptions] we provided all the participants with a small badge (shown on the left) for the collaboratin page of their wiki to show that they contributed with their opinion to our attempt to improve the usability of BioBricks in the future.
Additionally we will raffle a typical Bavarian present among all teams completing our survey.
Number of participants: 116
Number of different teams: 55
List of the Teams that have participated:

Contribution to "iGEM Memes" on Facebook

During spare time in the lab, the creative minds of our team submitted two pictures to the facebook page created by the team from Stanford-Brown

TUM young academy

Fig. 1: Logo of the TUM young academy

One group of the TUM young academy provided us their survey data, They are working on a webpage which is to provide information about genetic engineering and the regulations.
The TUM young academy supports student for five years with interdisciplinary projects. They want to support highly dedicated and outstanding students to achieve their goals.