Contributions

We are a group of biologists, biotechnologists, bioengineers and bioinformaticians. This project has been done by us students, from the definition of problem statement to designing and conducting experiments, modeling and designing the Wiki . Although the work was shared, from the beginning we assigned each group member with the responsibility for a particular task. Daniel was responsible for the lab, Maximilian for the sponsoring and the chip design, Nadine for administrative work and biobricks, Stefanie for human practice and the lab practical work; Elise for the model, Claude for the Wiki and for the diffusion model, Sumana for the updates on iGEM website and for model simulations.

However, we would not have been able to realise our project without the help and support of some important people. We dedicate this page to thank and acknowledge the contributions of these people. We would like to thank all our advisors and professors for their constant support and assistance during the course of the project. We would also like to thank everyone else who has helped us either with materials or through their invaluable advice. The acknowledgements are presented in detail below.

Acknowledgements

Modeling

Lukas Widmer has helped us constantly with the modeling and issues with the wiki. We are truly grateful to him for his continuous support and for guiding us throughout the course of the project.

Lab

Sabine Oesterle and Bartolomeo Angelici, our two main advisors for the lab have played a significant role throughout the project, right from helping us with the materials to resolving some key issues we faced during the project. We would like to thank them for their valuable insights and constant support.

3D-Printing & PDMS Chip

Mario Mauerer shared his knowledge and time to teach us some important concepts in 3D-printing. Thanks to him we were able to design our millifluidic devices.

Gregor Schmidt and Arne Wehling helped us with PDMS preparation and shared their knowledge on microfluidic chip design.

Flow cytometry

Verena Jäggin helped us with the set up and usage of flow cytometry. With her assistance we were able to analyse the expression of recombinase TP901 in detail.

pPaB plasmids

Andreas Bosshart provided all the pPaB plasmids which we used as backbone for our constructs and he was always there to help us when we ran into issues. We are very grateful to him for that.

Gibson assembly

Dr. Tania Roberts taught us how to perform Gibson assembly. Apart from providing us with the materials and protocols, she also helped us by proofreading our abstract. We are truly grateful to her.

Alginate beads

Steven Schmitt showed us how to produce alginate beads. He advised us in our project and let us use his materials and protocols. We are very grateful for his patience and generosity.

Last minute competent cells

Ali Yasin Sonay kindly provided us with special competent cells when we desperately needed them shortly before the parts submission deadline.

Riboregulators

James Collins and Jarred Callura really quickly and kindly replied to our emails with questions about the riboregulators they presented in the paper [http://www.pnas.org/content/109/15/5850.abstract Genetic switchboard for synthetic biology applications, PNAS, 2012].

Safety

Thanks to Niels Bürckert for emphasising the importance of safety and for the helpful discussions concerning the safety form.

Interviews

Thanks to all the experts who accepted to be interviewed for our Human Practice project. They helped us broaden our perspective on complexity.

General

We would like to thank all those who gave us useful feedbacks at our beer talk event. Last but not the least we would like to thank everyone who filled out our survey.