Team:Ruperto Carola/HP/Expert Interviews

Expert Interviews

From the very early stages of our project we endeavored to incorporate expert opinions wherever possible to have immediate feedback on the progress of our work. Here, you find all the expert interviews that we conducted.

Prof. Michael Knop

Professor at ZMBH Heidelberg, Expert in yeast biology

Prof. Knop is one of the leading experts for yeast synthetic biology. He has also studied signal transduction and evolution in yeast in depth. Since the main chassis for our project was yeast, his guidance was invaluable to us. Talking to Prof. Knop was highly informative. Through his advice we were able to see our approach from a different angle. He encouraged us to use yeast as our model and informed us about the benefits of yeast based systems, including their relatively cheap cost and ease of handling. We wanted to create a tool for the biotechnological community, and his feedback on GPCRs and directed evolution helped us shape the way we steered our project.

Dr. Dorothea Kaufman

Study Program Manager & Senior Lecturer at IPMB Heidelberg

Talking to Dorothea Kaufman was a pleasure. As an expert in science communication and education she gave us fresh insights for our human practice approach. Following her advice we wanted to make science more open to the broad public. Armed with our motto "Make science visible!" we went outside the lab to talk to people about our project. We visited a school to show young students what could be accomplished with biotechnology. Furthermore, we conducted several experiments to bring the wet lab work into their classroom and enable them to experience synthetic biology on their own.

Dr. Lorenz Adlung

Systems biologist and science enthusiast

Dr. Lorenz Adlung is not only a great expert in systems biology but also in science communication. He talked with us about antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) encouraging us to broaden the spectrum of our peptide sensing system. Acting on his advice, we decided to not just create a peptide sensor, but a tool that could easily be engineered to detect small peptides like certain AMPs. Since Dr. Adlung is an expert in science slams, we also asked him about public engagement and science communication. He told us that it is very important to inform people about our work to decrease the fear of synthetic biology and biotechnology. Therefore, we carefully decided to talk to people on the open street and other public places, handing out flyers and postcards.This way we hope to change peoples negative opinion about biotechnology and decrease fear and ignorance.

Dr. Ingo Janausch

Biological Safety Officer for genetic engineering and synthetic biology

As a responsible team we wanted to make our work as safe as possible not only for us, but also for fellow scientists, the broader community and of course the environment. For this reason we reached out to Dr. Ingo Janausch, safety officer for biology and genetic engineering.

Julius Upmeier zu Belzen

Student Assistant at the Digital Health Center of the Berlin Institute of Health

Julius Upmeier zu Belzen is not only an expert in machine learning but also a former iGEMer. He was one of the members of the very successful iGEM team Heidelberg in 2017. As an expert in software and machine learning he was able to give us great advice.Thereby he was able to help us to improve our software and modeling system.