Cooperation with Freiburg

We got to know the Freiburg iGEM team during the Biotechnology 2020+ conference in Berlin, where several teams from Germany presented their projects and were offered the opportunity to gather around, discuss and share experiences in the lab. Since we talked with the Freiburg team about our first experiences in the lab, we noticed that our two projects have something in common: the GibsonAssembly. That was the start of our cooperation.

The iGEM-team Freiburg had already successfully conducted several Gibson Cloning attempts and was able to establish a well working protocol. They offered to realize a little workshop with us so we could improve our knowledge about Gibson Cloning and the practical implementation. On the other hand Freiburg had problems with the CHO cells they were working with for the realization of their project. As the Bioquant is in close connection with the German Cancer Research Center we managed to organise the urgently needed CHO-Pro5 to help Freiburg.

On July 15, 2013 Natalie, Fenja and Michael arrived in Heidelberg and we met in our laboratory in the BioQuant. After a short introduction of our team and the three team-members from Freiburg, we directly started with the Gibson Assembly. Together we worked 3 hours on the theoretical and practical introduction of Gibson Cloning. We managed to successfully assemble and transform their constructs and had positive results on the next day.

Of course the fun was not missed out. During a team-dinner we got to know Natalie, Fenja and Michael better and had good discussions about several similarities in the iGEM-teams like team compositions, how to embellish the long hours in the lab and general experiences we gained in the competition.

It was not only a great collaboration, but we also had a lot of fun and are very grateful for having gotten to know the iGEM team Freiburg better. We want to thank Freiburg for their help and are very much looking forward to a great time and new experiences in Lyon together.

Collecting Soil Samples for iGEM Team Norwich

As the iGEM team of Norwich worked with the bacteria Streptomyces, which can be found in soil, they wanted to collect samples from all over the world. We found their project very interesting as Streptomyces are an essential organism in our indigoidine project as well. Thus we went to the forest and dug little holes at a couple of different places to collect soil in falcon tubes. All samples were labelled with date, location etc. and send to them for further analysis. It was a lot of fun and a good reason to get out of the lab and into the nature. We hope that the team Norwich could make use of the samples and discovered many interesting specimens in our Heidelberg soil.

Feedback for iGEM Team Purdue

The iGEM Team of Purdue University invited us to support their project by giving input for their plan to create a new standard for biobrick submission, which should lead to more qualitative biobricks. We were glad to help by for example providing our opinion by filling out their survey. Furthermore within a video conference we talked about the ideas of the team and how we think about them, how they would fit to our own needs and how they could implement them. We hope that our reviews were useful to them.