The Main Characters
Here we want to give an insight into who was behind it all and which people have given us indispensable
help
in the last months. With every fruitful discussion, good advice or critical questioning they contributed
to
the success of this project. A big THANK YOU to all those who stood by us, helped us and believed in us.
All
contributions have helped us tremendously and last but not least have brought our project forward. Thank
you
for assisting us throughout the project, without you all of this would not have been possible.
Students
Lea Vogt (a.k.a. Megamind) - She contributed many hours to wet lab work. Her meticulousness was
often exploited to prevent chaos, both in the lab and to keep deadlines. Additionally, she took great
care
of our finances and attracted many sponsors who supported us with the materials and services needed to
keep
our project going during these tough times. All necessary articles were ordered by her, so without that,
no
wet lab work could have happened.
Andreas Enkerlin (a.k.a. Gibson Soldier) - The whole team is incredibly thankful that Andreas
joined
the team in late July, because from that moment the answer to every wet lab question was “Ask Andreas”.
Our
own in-house expert in cloning, he helped enormously to optimize our PCRs and get those Gibson
Assemblies
done. Always has a plan B ;). There was no better person to play our Gibson Soldier (check out our
team’s
promo video to watch him in action) because if someone knows our fight in the Wetlab, it's him.
Aarón Refisch (a.k.a El Eyron) - He started executing his vision, while being trapped in Chile,
coordinating our team meetings and managing our social media with some funny ideas and customs. Later
on, he
organized several classes about synthetic biology combining Spanish, English and German with school
students
from Chile and designed a theory-practical course at Experimenta. Once he made it back to Tuebingen, he
worked a lot of hours in the laboratory. But, here is when his creativity exploded, when he wrote,
filmed,
played and edited our videos or helped in writing an article about COVID 19. Through the year he has
been
our contact person for several finished and ongoing collaborations and knowledge exchanges.
Isabel (a.k.a. Lady Primer) - She always had some time left for a last minute primer design or
project pitch in front of possible sponsors. Worth mentioning is also her good mood and positive vibes
which
is a good fit for every laboratory session and our otherwise virtual meetings.
Florian Vögele (a.k.a. The Young Prodigy) - He spent a lot of time in the laboratory and
progressed
the project through his work and efforts there. Even though he started in the team with less practical
laboratory experience, he learned a lot along the way about laboratory practices and in the end could
perform them independently. He is the Exhibit-A for the popular catchphrase ‘Learning by doing’.
David Kessler (a.k.a. The Kingpin) - He not only came up with our wet lab project idea and
worked a
lot in the laboratory to make things happen, but he also kept us motivated with organizing regular team
building events. This was crucial for our fantastic iGEM experience, because getting to know each other
well, helped with productive teamwork and the lively exchange with other team members was an enriching
experience. Additionally, he is our Doodle champion, whenever dates need to be fixed.
Benedikt Jäger (a.k.a. The Nano Duke) - Even though only joining the team in June, he was
involved
in wet-lab work from the start. He was essential for the team in helping with logistics, shuttling all
the
needed materials between the two laboratories that we worked in. He also held a class for Chile
high-school
about Nano-science and its link to synthetic biology.
Katja Sievert (a.k.a. The Scien-guist (Science Linguist)) - She helped whenever something had to
be
written or translated in English, either by doing it herself or proofreading afterwards. Her style and
language skills are impressive and make everything sound professional. Additionally, she was involved in
Human practice, where she conducted interviews and held an online class for a high school in Chile.
Luiselotte Rausch (a.k.a. Ms. Jill of All trades) - She was part of the Wet lab team especially
in
the late stage of the project (including weekends). She was responsible for several aspects of
financing,
where she helped in acquiring sponsors by presenting a project pitch and the finance plan. Additionally
she
was greatly involved in writing, acting and editing of our team’s videos.
Sophia Gaupp (a.k.a. The Sci-Collaborator) - She was involved in human practices and took
responsibility for our partnership with the Experimenta. She took care of our social media presence, for
example by introducing all of our team members. Additionally, she led the cooperation with team Stuttgart
and also dipped her toes at times in the Finance section.
Anirudh Natarajan (a.k.a. The Experimentalist) - The Last Man standing when working in the
laboratory
on the weekends. Moreover, he was a necessary member of the Finance team, sweet talking companies to
sponsor
us and at times, getting us some goodies. Our Go-to guy when some serious wet lab-shopping needs to be
done,
even on short notice. He knows how to get things done at the last minute and ensures everything ends up
happening in a seamless fashion.
Elias (a.k.a Mr. Gene Ruler) - Besides
having an impressive acting career and being part-time latino for the Chile-class, he is responsible for
the
drylab, website and the wikimedia-page. He planned and executed molecular dynamic simulations and
evaluated
several public services to receive appropriate structures for our phytochelatin and riboswitch.
Additionally, he was involved in the collaboration with
Waterloo.
Elisabeth Schneider (a.k.a. The Drylab Connoisseur) - She greatly contributed to Bioinformatics
related problem solving as well as project planning and modelling in the drylab. Additionally, she was
working in our partnership with the Experimenta and
Waterloo.
Advisors
Lina Widerspick (a.k.a. Wetlab Fairy Godmother) - She was incredibly helpful regarding everything
related to the wet lab. Since Lina has great wet lab experience, she always knew what to do when
something
did not go according to plan. She was the one to ask when it came to planning a wet lab experiment or
troubleshooting. Also, all Wiki texts had to pass her quality control process.
Lukas Heumos (a.k.a. The Drylab Guru) - He was a great support especially considering the drylab
project design. Due to his previous iGEM experience, he knew what we should keep in mind and what
possibly
can go wrong. He was always happy to lend a helping hand and was there for us when we were unsure about
something.
Famke Bäuerle (a.k.a. The Organizer) - The person who we turned to when we had questions on how
to
deal with some financial issues. She set up our organizational tools to give us a good start using her
knowledge from last year. Famke added to our drylab discussions when something came up. Without her last-minute wiki editing skills we would never have finished this masterpiece.
Instructors
Lucas Mühling - He took over when we needed someone to guide us urgently. He always thought
about
the ‘what ifs’ and had good advice when it came to wet lab planning.
Patrick Schweizer- His experience and comprehension of synthetic biology was very beneficial
to
get our project started. He constantly encouraged us to think outside the box when we were trying to
find
the right project. Due to his multifaceted experience he helped us to get an understanding for what
would
lie ahead of us.
Primary PI
Prof. Dr. Largus T. Angenent - He is leading the Environmental Biotechnology Group in the
Center
for Applied Geosciences (ZAG) at the University of Tübingen. He and the whole Env. Biotech. Group are
very
invested in the success of our iGEM Team. Thus, they not only provided us with the organisational
support of
being our supervisors, but also pitched in when we were in desperate need of an enzyme or chemical. For
this, we are very grateful.
Secondary PI
Dr. Bastian Molitor - His deep understanding of synthetic biology was extremely valuable during
our
project development. We are very grateful for his support.
Partner Institutions
Due to the emergent situation and regulations with COVID-19, this year's search for a Wet lab space was
a
rollercoaster ride. The team pursued a journey of hunting for labs that could take us in at these tough
times. We could not be more grateful to AG Böckler and AG Wizenmann for letting us work in
their
laboratories. Special thanks to Susanne Hennig and Marcel Dammann from AG Böckler for their help in all
questions that arose on site. We are also grateful to Andi and Uli from AG Wizenmann for giving us the
opportunity to work efficiently whenever we want, even during these difficult times and for their
support on
every issue that came up.
We would like to thank the department of Environmental Biotechnology for their support and for answering all questions we had.
We would like to thank the department of Environmental Biotechnology for their support and for answering all questions we had.
Project Advice
Huge thank you to Dr. Thomas Riedel, whose paper “Temperature-associated changes in groundwater quality”
inspired us to not only choose a project, which is related to environmental problems, but also pointed
out
the importance of good water quality management. We also want to thank him for the time and commitment
he
put in the interview we had, where he added further context to our work and also gave us some outlook
shaping our project and taking it to a whole new level.
We also want to thank Dr. Philipp Thiel, not only for providing the much needed access to compute power
via
the University servers, but especially for helping us define the scope and direction of our drylab
project
and offering expertise on tools and their usage.
We want to thank Team
Stuttgart and Team
Waterloo for a successful collaboration and all your valuable
inputs. It was great to get to know you!
Thank you Team
Peru
for
reaching out to us and introducing us to your interesting field of work.
It was a pleasure to collaborate with Team Edinburgh on their biosensor manual.
Thank you for this opportunity.
Thanks to
MSP-Maastricht, who set up a journal initiative this year. This gave us, and many other teams, the
opportunity to write articles for the proceedings and muggle journal. This also included being part of
the
review process and consequently the involved students gained invaluable experience in publishing,
reviewing,
and editing.
Interview Partners
Despite being very busy coordinating and investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Prof. Dr. Kremsner
gave
us some
minutes of his precious time and answered all our questions about the virus, the present situation and
about
the current state of the most promising vaccine studies. From his interview two articles were born for
MSP-Maastricht’s journal initiative.
We would like to thank all of our Interviewee Partners for our mini Corona series on instagram:
Spedition
Brucker, Christina Sievert (pharmacist) Nicole B., Andrea E.
Thank you for your openness about this new and challenging situation.
Other
Many thanks to Moritz Weinhändler for introducing us to the fine art of editing a video. It has been a
great
help to get us started on our promo and presentation videos.
We want to thank the Innovation Center for giving us a great introduction into company formation, patent
law
and much more.
Thanks to the local radio station Neckaralb Live in Reutlingen, who gave us the opportunity to introduce
our
project in a short report to the general public.
All figures on our wiki which are not images of gels or photos have been created with Biorender.
