Attributions

After a lot of brainstorming, discussion and presentations in self-organized team meetings over the first months, we decided to work on a Microbial Fuel Cell, although this issue is very complex and there is hardly no expertise in this area of ​​research at our university. iGEM-Team Bielefeld 2013 team members are probably the first people at the University of Bielefeld, who built an Microbial Fuel Cell.

All work described on this wiki or on our Partsregistry pages was done by ourselves. We managed the whole project, from planing to financing and the complete lab work by ourselves. Nevertheless, we could not have done all this work without the help, advice and guidance of several people. Hence, special thanks to the following people you can see under Acknowledgements part.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the people who made our project possible, helped and supported us:

• Prof. Dr. Alfred Pühler for promoting our work an giving us the opportunity to host the CeBiTec Student academy.

• Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Erwin Flaschel for providing us with lab space. We were able to use all the fermentation and downstream processing equipment we needed in his Fermentation Engineering lab. Additionally, he helped us finding sponsors by mediating contacts.

• Prof. Dr. Thomas Noll helped us finding sponsors by mediating contacts.

• Prof. Dr. Karl Friehs – By inspecting our Biosafety-System, he had the idea of using the RNase Ba (Barnase) instead of the Colicin E2 as toxic gene product. Besides he gave us the hint to use a double lac promoter to reduce the basal transcription of the lac promoter.

• Our Instructor Dr. Jörn Kalinowski for giving us the opportunity to participate in iGEM through letting us work in his lab. We were provided with our own laboratory room and could use all instruments and materials of the lab. Furthermore, Jörn helped us with scientific guidance, financing, paper work and was always available for answering questions.

• Our Instructor Dr. Christian Rückert, who always gave great advice for our scientific problems.

• The working group of Prof. Dr. Dario Anselmetti, with special help from Dr. Volker Walhorn, who measured our self-prepared AFM glass slides and visualized the cell surface of Escherichia coli with porins by atomic force microscopy.

• Nils Christian Lübke and Timo Wolf as former iGEM team members helped us with their experience listened to our endless discussions and problems during our weekly team. Thank you for being such great advisors and giving us the chance to develop our complete own project without any rules. Thank you for your trust.

• Dr. Falk Harnisch for being a great expert – Via Skype we discussed about our project and he visited us in Bielefeld to inspect our MFC so that we were able to benefit a lot from his enormous knowledge!

• Dr. Heino Büntemeyer and Jana Heinrich – who helped us with HPLC of Riboflavin.

• Dr. Petra Lutter for helping us getting started with the model.

• Robert Braun as former iGEM team member helped us with his experience, listened to our discussions and problems during our weekly lab work.

• The sequencing service of our university – For sequencing our BioBricks and especially our devices at the last minute, giving us the chance to verify them right in time.

• Lena Sinkel and Markus Persicke, who helped us with the practical performance of LC-ESI MS/MS and supported us in the data analysis.

• Dominik Cholewa and Phillip Grimm who helped us with materials for constructing our Microbial Fuel Cell.

• Maurice Telaar for his expertise with molecular cloning.

• The local hackerspace helping us with modelling, slicing and handling a 3D printed biodegredable MFC.

• The Physicist Luca Manitz for printing our biodregable MFC.

• Vera Ortseifen who gave us support dealing with protein analysis by MALDI-TOF MS. After our sample preparation and tryptic digestion she measured the samples and also provided help in the data analysis.

• The experts Dr. Arnold Sauter and Aeneas Wanner for their project assessment.

• Melanie Gerken for helping us with the modeling, especially with the software MATLAB.

• Work shop of the biological and technical faculty for making items of our Microbial Fuel Cell.

• All members of the Coryne AG for sharing the lab and equipment with us as well as helping us with our everyday questions.

• All members of the Fermentation Engineering AG for sharing the lab and equipment with us as well as helping us with our everyday questions.

• All family members and friends that we have neglected in the last few months and still support us.

Subteams

• To get this big project organized we divided the team in small subteams:

• Read more about all team members on our team page.