Ilia Kats

One of our team members, the secret chief-nerd of our group, Ilia Kats had the initial idea for our project and inspired us all with his dream of easy and fast recycling of gold. He also came up with the concept to exploit the NRPS modularity for setting up the NRPS designer.
Besides all of his brain work Ilia was indispensable for all of the wetlab work for the different sub projects. He was single-handedly responsible for cloning the methylmalonyl-CoA patwhay for the delftibactin project. In the Tyrocidine and indigoidine subproject he was involved in the pilot experiments. And last but not least, his programming skills were essential for the successful implementation of our NRPS-Designer software where he used his supernatural force to eliminate even the toughest bugs.
A big THANK U from the whole team for the inspiration and great humor.

Gold Recycling
Delftibactin

The cloning strategies and amplification of the Del-cluster were in general performed and developed by Florian Schmidt, Sophie Rabe, Nils Kurzawa and Johanna Meichsner. The experiments started with the amplification of DelH executed by Johanna Meichsner which turned out to be one of the most challenging parts of our project. Johanna proved to be extremely resilient to recurrent setbacks and her power of endurance gave a great example to the whole team. Florian Schmidt, Sophie Rabe and Nils Kurzawa took care of the plasmid assembly of the other genes from the Del-cluster. After DelRest was succesfully amplified Florian Schmidt and Sophie Rabe worked as well on the plasmid creation of DelH. Sophie Rabe had also the responsibility of proteins assays, delftibactin purification and Maldi-TOF. All of them were extremely dedicated to their work and happily cloned day and night.
Ilia Kats cloned the pIK8 plasmid and all prior plasmids necessary for the establishment of the methylmalonyl-CoA pathway. He performed all steps of the cloning procedure of these plasmids from primer design up to electroporation and screening.
Here we want to give a special thank you to our advisors Dominik Niopek, Fanny Georgi and Katharina Genreith for their great help in planning the cloning strategies and introducing us to the world of primer design!

Module Shuffling
Tyrocidine

The main focus of this project was to demonstrate the feasibility of NRPS module shuffling. This was performed by Joshua Sachs, Philipp Walch, Tania Christiansen and Anja Riedel. They established the experimental strategy and designed all corresponding primers needed for the amplification of the different Tyc modules. Tania Christiansen was especially responsible for the BioBrick submission and the cloning of the fragments into the needed RFCs. Anja Riedel took care of the linker variation and Philipp Walch performed the indigoidine-valin and indigoidine-ornithine tags.
Another essential part in the Tyrocidine project was the mass spectrometry of which Joshua Sachs was in charge. The ccdB-construct was generated by Joshua Sachs and Philipp Walch. Everyone in this group contributed to the great success of the project part! Here, we want to thank our advisor Lorenz Adlung who often helped us with his experience which he shared in frequent lab-meetings discussions.

Domain Shuffling
Indigoidine

Ralf Beer and Konrad Herbst designed primers and developed the strategies for the domain shuffling. Not only the shuffling, also the characterization of the submitted Biobricks was executed by these two hard-working guys who did not mind spending 48 hours in a row a the bench. Thanks to Hannah Meyer they always had an advisor at their side with whom they had many creative scientific discussions.

NRPS-Designer
Software

The software-team consisted of Konrad Herbst, Ilia Kats, Nikolaos Ignatiadis, Julia Schessner and Nils Kurzawa. They worked together on the implementation of the NRPS-Designer software and the establishment of the respective database. Additionally, Joshua Sachs, Anja Riedel and Philipp Walch contributed to the maintenance of the database. Furthermore, Ilia Kats was administrator of our internal server. All of the people mentioned above worked on our sub-software project iGEM42. The advisors Hannah Meyer and Tim Heinemann helped, not only with the NRPS-Designer, but also with motivating the whole team. A big thanks to Hannah for baking all those cookies and to Tim for helping to eat them!

Wiki-Design

Our wiki is uses stylesheets from Bootstrap 3.0 and was implemented by Nils Kurzawa. He wrote the main javascripts and css style sheets used on this wiki. Nils created the main page together with the project pages and all templates. Tania Christiansen was responsible for all the pictures used for the wiki navigation and team pictures. All team members worked together to generate the interface graphics and basic figures in inkskape. Especially Tania Christiansen and Anja Riedel could bring in their talent. Thanks also to our creative advisors Katharina Genreith and Fanny Georgi who came up with many ideas.
After the basic implementation Nils received help in the wiki design from Nikolaos Ignatiadis, Ilia Kats and Johanna Meichsner. Important to mention is again Tim Heinemann here for his niggling but always helpful comments.

Human Practice
Software

The human practice part was organized by Philipp Walch who dedicated a lot of his time to this part of our iGEM project. As he was a member of the education initiative "Life-Science Lab", he organized the essay competition for the high-school students. Joshua Sachs who volunteers as a fire fighter in his free time established a contact with the army which enabled us to participate in the bioweapons defense program (ABC). Through Johanna Meichsner we got to know Dorothea van Aaken, who organizes environmental workshops for primary students. Due to various personal contacts to Heidelberg university and the German Cancer Research Center (Dkfz) we had the possibility to discuss our project with scientists from different backgrounds and were able to organize a casual lecture evening. We want to thank Fanny Georgi for her valuable help with parts of the organization. Sophie Rabe we want to thank for her help in organizing many parts of our human practice project as well.