Team:ETH Zurich/ETH Zuerich

Zurich

View of the inner city with the four main churches visible, and the Albis in the backdrop

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ETH Zurich

ETH Hoenggerberg with the new HIT building

The ETH Zurich is a science and technology university in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Locals sometimes refer to the ETH as "Poly", derived from its original name "Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum" or "Federal Polytechnic Institute".

Like its sister institution "École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne", it is an integral part of the ETH domain and directly subordinate to the "Federal Department of Home Affairs".

The ETH is an internationally oriented university. It is a founding member of the "IDEA League" and the "International Alliance of Research Universities" (IARU). Additionally, it is a member of the "Top Industrial Managers for Europe" network.

Our lab

Our Workingplace

For our work on the iGEM project, Prof. Panke provided us with working space in his "Bioprocess Laboratory" of the ETH Zurich.

CAB/CNB Building

It is located in the CNB building in the center of Zurich.

Previous Teams

2007 iGEM team

2007 ETHZ iGEM Team

Excerpt from the 2007 ETHZ iGEM Wiki

Multipurpose Cell Lines

Our system has the ability to behave in different ways according to an internal toggle inside it switching states based on the chemical substances that the system is exposed to. The toggle states could generally be used to trigger events such as enzyme synthesis, transcriptional regulation, virion production, or even cell death. Therefore, one may view the bacterial cell line containing this system as a multipurpose cell line. By adding a certain chemical to a cell line, the latter may be trained to exhibit a desired behavior, and then it is not necessary any more to construct two independent cell lines.

This means that one applies an “input engineering” instead of a “DNA engineering” approach. If one extends this idea to several multi-inducible toggle switches being harbored in the same cell line, the number of possible phenotypes increases to 2n, where n equals the number of toggle switches. For example, if one would have 5 such toggle switches inside a cell line, 32 different behavior patterns would be possible.

For the purpose of creating a toggle switch that is activated in a specific phase only and not always (a multi-inducible toggle switch), as is required for stable biological automatons, we introduced the concept of double promoters to the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, which can be helpful for engineering systems which exhibit a desired behavior only at specific times.

2006 iGEM team

2006 ETHZ iGEM team

2006 ETHZ iGEM Wiki

2006 ETHZ iGEM team

2005 iGEM team

2005 ETHZ iGEM team

Abstract from the 2005 ETHZ iGEM Wiki:

The project of the ETH Zurich team consists of the design and in vivo implementation of a gene circuit that can count to 2. In essence, the counter uses two toggle switches, each storing 1 bit, to keep track of the 4 internal states. The design of the counter is highly modular, with the hope that it can be included as a unit in larger circuits, and also combined with further counter instances to keep track of a much larger number of states, up to 2^n with n units. To facilitate further developments and integration to other projects, the parts of the counter are available in form of BioBricks. Among many exciting applications, the availability of a counter enables the execution of sequential instructions, and therfore paves the way for the execution of artificial programs inside living cells.