Team:Duesseldorf/Ontour

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Bonn Spring Festival

The iGEM Team Bonn came up with a special meetup this year: the iGEM Spring Festival. On the first weekend in May an entertaining three-day event with interesting talks, workshops, poster sessions and a sightseeing tour was set up. 25 iGEM teams from all over Europe participated, in order to present their projects as well as their teams.

Fig. 1: Our prize: “Best iGEM Project”.

Especially worth mentioning at this point is the “After iGEM Workshop” in which ambassadors from the iGEM headquarter explained to us what we can do after our projekt to continue to be active in the iGEM community, which great benefits this community offers to us, and how to become an ambassador. It was a great opportunity for us to get to know other teams, exchange collaboration ideas and acquire valuable presentation skills. Due to the poster session we gained our first experience in how to confidently and spontaneously react to questions, that are certainly going to occur during the big finale in front of the judges in Boston at the Giant Jamboree.

We are more than happy that we won the “Best iGEM Project”-prize! At this point we want to thank everyone who has voted for us during the festival. This prize is very special for us as it showed that we are on the right path with our project. In summary, this amazing meetup was a great experience and brought all participants closer together. It strengthened old connections and created new ones. Many thanks to iGEM Bonn for this wonderful event!

Fig. 2: A part of our team in front of our poster at the meetup in Bonn.

Labvolution Hannover

The Labvolution is a european trade fair for innovative laboratory equipment and improvement of the workflow inside of laboratories and took place from the 21th to 23th of May. This years focus was on ”the integrated lab” and the future of international laboratory work. Also important was the global communication between people inside of the laboratory, the locations and the global market about research and industry.

This trade fair was a great opportunity to see, how the work in the lab will be in the future and how new laboratory assistant may be developed. The last point is connected to the VirtualReality and the way this kind of programs have a high impact on the global connection. With this development it will be more easier to have an uniform basis of the laboratory work. We had also the chance to test one of this VirtualReality-laboratories and saw the simple but effective way of this learning programs. Additional to this we tried pipette in VirtualReality and had a little fun competition at the stand of Eurofins Genomics, who is better in pipetting.

Beside of the VirtualReality we had a glimps into the robotics work, so we could imagine what robots can do in the laboratory today and which evolution it will have prospective. More and more variations of pipetting robots were introduced. The future vision of the simple laboratory work will be faster and automatic to get high amounts of results in short time.

We also used the opportunity of the trade fair to talk to many representatives of companies and show them our ambition of our project “SynMylk”. We had many interesting conversation about the topics “Synthetic Biology”, “Genetically Modified Organisms” and how innovations can affect the world and solve problems like the climate change. The feedback about our project was very positive and we got many questions to parts of the project like how we got this idea and how we want to present it to the public. This was a very good training for us to present ourselves in the public and react to different situations.

Alongside of the new companies, we visit the companies that already sponsor us. It was a nice experience for us to get to know the people, who help us with our idea and work to realize the project “SynMylk”. Our Supporters were also interested to learn more about us and the way we improved the project over time. Important for us was that we could show our gratitude for the support in person.

After many hours of impressions and conversations we stayed at the the stand of Sarstedt and let the day ended with more intense conversations with them. It was a fine evening with interesting and funny stories which went a while longer than the official opening hours of the “Labvolution”.

Fig. 1: Arrival at the main entrance of the Labvolution.

Cyano 2019

For the fourth time, the conference “Cyano” took place, this time in Tübingen from the 11th to 13th of September. This young investigator symposium takes place once a year and invites researchers around Germany working on all scientific fields related to cyanobacteria to meet up. This conference especially gives Master and Ph. D. students the opportunity to present the results of their research and get feedback or other advice for future work.
Kindly, the chance was given to SynMylk Team to present our project to the cyanobacteria experts and receive advice from the audience, as well as discuss it later with a number of experts, as we included cyanobacteria into large parts of our project.

This conference was a great experience since we were able to discuss our project with people who worked intensively with cyanobacteria and learned about other ways to work with the green microorganisms. We also received help for questions that we had not been able to answer ourselves so far. On Thursday evening we had a round-table discussion where every person had two to three minutes to present their project and ask one question to be discussed. We took the opportunity to talk about growth conditions and how a higher yield can be reached. Another tip given to us was that an increased production of malonyl-CoA can be achieved when malonat is added to the medium and biotin is not available. In the end it was a great training to give a talk for an audience as it prepared us more for the presentation in Boston.
Additionally we met the iGEM team from Marburg on this conference. They presented their project, a cyanobacterial toolbox, with a poster presentation. We talked much about our project and the problems we had to master during this iGEM year. Plans for a collaboration were prepared, but the minor time which was left made the execution of thus plans difficult.

In addition to the scientific part of the conference we also had social parts. We spent most evenings talking to other attendees while dining together. We also participated in a boat tour to become acquainted to the town Tübingen.