Team:ETH Zurich/Team/Overview

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Revision as of 17:38, 27 October 2008

How the Team met

Part of the team heared of Igem during the [http://www.vvz.ethz.ch/Vorlesungsverzeichnis/lerneinheitPre.do?lerneinheitId=48939&semkez=2008S&lang=en Synthetic Biology Lecture] given by our Instructors at Igem. The rest of the team that didnt originate from this lecture applied after reciving this ETH wide mail promoting Igem

What is the most exciting thing natural scientists and engineers can do together? - The iGEM summer competition!
iGEM is an international student competition in the field of Synthetic Biology, organized by MIT. Each participating university sets up an interdisciplinary student team consisting of 8 to 10 biologists/chemists and engineers.
Half of the team has to be undergraduate students, but also MSc and PhD students can participate.
The team's goal is to collect ideas on a novel biological system, analyze the biological and engineering design alternatives, including mathematical modeling of the system, and choose the 'best' design.
This system is then translated into DNA code, put into a cell and tested experimentally.
In November, all teams present their projects at the MIT in Boston. In 2007, there were 57 teams from all over the world, including teams from MIT, UCSF, Caltech, Duke, Stanford, TIT, Princeton, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and more teams from the US, Australia, India, China, Japan, and Europe (http://parts.mit.edu/igem07/index.php/Main_Page ).

After major successes in 2005 (best engineering), 2006(best device) and 2007 (best presentation), ETH is participating again this year, and Profs. Sven Panke and Jörg Stelling are assembling a mixed team of Engineers and natural scientists from the Bachelor, Master and Ph.D. level. If you want to be part of the iGEM experience, apply until April 11th on

Nine Students got selected and on Wednesday the 16th of April the first meeting got sceduled.
Students from very diverse fields got selected for the team as you can see on our Team Members Page.

Boot Camp

What followed, the team of last year liked to refer as "the Boot Camp". An intense two weeks Crash Course into the field of Syntetic Biology was provided by our Advisors, during which we learned about the diverse aspects of Syntectic Biology as you can see below:

The "Bootcamp" Scedule
Date	Topic1	Topic2
Mo, 21.4	Syntetic Biology: [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7067/full/nature04342.html Foundations for engineering biology] [http://www.nature.com/msb/journal/v1/n1/full/msb4100025.html Refactoring bacteriophage T7]	DNA de nova design:
Th, 24.4	Distance: [http://www.pnas.org/content/101/17/6355.abstract?ct Spatiotemporal control of gene expression with pulse-generating networks]	DNA circuits:
Mo, 28.4	Modeling biological systems:	Network dynamics:
Wed, 30.4	Identification & Robustness:	Synthetic circuit design:
Fr, 2.5	Oscillators:	Hysteresis:
Tu, 6.5	Noise/single cells:	mRNA tools, protein tools:
Fr, 9.5	Meeting - reduce Topics from Brainstorming	Restriction enzymes Cloning strategies Biobrick standard
Th, 15.5	Meeting	The MIT registry
Wed, 21.5	Meeting	Protein half-life, specific proteases, epPCR to adapt systems Parameter manipulations
Th, 29.5	Meeting End of Planning Phase - Submission DNA Sequence	GFP - protein and measurements. Chemical/physical basis of XFP. Flourescence, excitation and emission spectra of various proteins, measurement techniques
2.-5.6	LABCOURSE at CNB	Basic hands-on modelling

Lab Course at CNB

Part of the "Bootcamp" schedule was also a Lab crash course of one week at the beginning of June. The aim of that course was to introduce the non-biologists to basic techniques of microbiology and molecular cloning. That way, they were able to assist the biologist so that they could concentrate more on experimental planning and interpretation of results. The idea was to grasp this chance of an interdisciplinary project in order to allow the students to get an insight into the field that is not their background. Therefore, the modellers got comfortable in the lab, and the biologists learned about modelling.

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 === Lab Course at CNB ===
-Like you can also see in the "Bootcamp" scedule we had a Lab Course for one week at the beginning of June. In this week mainly the students that didnt come from a biology background got a Crash Course into Lab work, so that we could also help out in the Lab later on.
-Thanks to [http://www.ipe.ethz.ch/laboratories/bpl/people/meyer Andreas Meyer] for spending this week with us!
+Part of the "Bootcamp" schedule was also a Lab crash course of one week at the beginning of June. The aim of that course was to introduce the non-biologists to basic techniques of microbiology and molecular cloning. That way, they were able to assist the biologist so that they could concentrate more on experimental planning and interpretation of results. The idea was to grasp this chance of an interdisciplinary project in order to allow the students to get an insight into the field that is not their background. Therefore, the modellers got comfortable in the lab, and the biologists learned about modelling.
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