Bielefeld

The city is localized in North Rhine-Westphalia on the fringes of the Teutoburg Forest. The towns’ landmark is the Sparrenburg which is about 800 years old. A well-known company is the food giant Dr. Oetker whose frozen pizzas are famous.

The University

In 2009 the Bielefeld University celebrated its 40th anniversary and thus is a relative young University. Among the 18,500 students are 1,433 international students from all over the world. All 13 faculties find their place in one building, which is a big advantage for the interdisciplinary research. In 2011 the construction of a replacement building started. It is planned that all faculties, one after the other, move to the replacement building, during the corresponding part of the main building is reconstructed. Further, the [http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/bau/campus/plan.html campus] is extended by another two buildings, a research center for interactive intelligent systems and a new building for the university of applied sciences. The entire project is planned to be completed in 2025.

The iGEM laboratory is located in the Center for Biotechnology ([http://www.cebitec.uni-bielefeld.de/ CeBiTec]) which was founded in 1998 and is consisting of four institutes:

• Institute for Bioinformatics
• Institute for Genome Research and Systems Biology
• Institute for Biophysics and Nanoscience
• Institute for Biochemistry and Bioengineering

Novel technologies allow high-level research with the potential for unique international collaborations. Especially the setups for second generation sequencing, such as 454 Pyrosequencing and Illumina, are worth mentioning. Further, high level research is performed in the field of transcriptomics and metabolomics (some applied techniques are GC-GC-MS, MALDI-TOF-MS, qTOF-MS).