Evolution of the iGEM Team Frankfurt

Our Team startet to search for a suitable project for the iGEM 2013 competition in October 2012. First we screened former iGEM Wikis for interesting but incompleted ideas and held in mind our project ideas as well as the final subject from the previous year. Some of us informed theirselves and developed their own ideas and presented the topics to the rest of us for an open discussion. Each of this discussions came along with small lectures about important methods in molecular biology, since the teammembers are from different scientific disciplines including biophysics, biochemistry, biotechnology, biology and bioinformatics. Thus we've had many different inputs for new ideas and things to teach each other. After having abandoned several ideas (including luminescent plants, bacteria-produced biofilms and de novo in vivo synthesis) due to practical and time issues pursuing these plans, we remembered that if there's a fundament, we can just as well build a house on top of it. For this reason, we decided in spring 2013 to not only go back to the steviol topic from 2012 but also to solve previous problems and to dig deeper into the subject.

For creative and professional assistance we could rely really fast on our previous mentors but also got new assistance by contacting several group leaders and professors on our university. After laboratory space was provided and financial possibilities were given, we've been able to sum up our previous work and give the go-ahead for this years project.