Attributions

Our team initiated the project finding with a lot of discussions and brainstorming by self-organized team meetings during the first months. Throughout this process we decided to work on the topic of a reverse microbial fuel cell, the implementation of the Calvin cycle as well as the production of isobutanol in E. coli. There is almost no expertise at our university at several aspects of our project. The literature research was done on our own to identify scientists at Bielefeld University, who might become possible experts. We engaged discussions with several people at the university to get basic ideas and to gain deeper knowledge of the different project parts.
The whole work described on the wiki as well as on the parts registry was executed by ourselves. Starting with the project planning, over acquiring financial support, to the lab work, as well as the writing of our wiki and parts registry was done by the team.
Nevertheless, the whole project would not have such a progress without the help of several people. Those people are mentioned in the acknowledgement section.

Acknowledgements

General support

Our instructor Prof. Dr. Jörn Kalinowski for giving us the opportunity to participate in iGEM through letting us work in his lab. We were provided with our own laboratory room and could use all instruments and materials of the lab. Furthermore, Jörn helped us with scientific guidance, financing, paper work and was always available for answering questions.
Prof. Dr. Kristian Müller who participated in our weekly seminars gave us several adives for a better progess of our project.
Our Instructor Dr. Christian Rückert, who always gave great advice for our scientific problems.
Timo Wolf, Nils Lübke, Manuel Wittchen: As our advisors who helped us with their experience, listened to our endless discussions and problems during our weekly team seminar. Thank you for being such great advisors and giving us the chance to develop our own project. Thank you for your trust.
Lukas Rositzka as former iGEM team member helped us with his experience, listened to our discussions and problems during our weekly seminar.

Premises

Group fermentation technology provided us their premises to do several cultivation experiments with our self constructed fermenter and their own fermenters.
Kalinowski lab provided us a lab and several machines to do our research

Analytics support

Dr. Marcus Persicke guided us through HPLC-MS and GC-MS execution and analysis for enzyme assays and isobutanol quantification.
Vera Ortseifen analyzed prepared samples with MALDI-TOF to identify the proteins.
Viola Mönkemöller and Prof. Dr. Thomas Huser (Huser lab) helped us to make some high resolute pictures of our carboxysome with the GFP fusion with the structured illumination microscope (SIM)
Robin Wördenweber (Kruse lab) gave us some hints for thin layer chromatography
Lukas Rositzka and Prof. Dr. Kristian Müller (Müller lab) helped us to make some pictures of our carboxysome with the GFP fusion with a Leika DMI6000
Dr. Heino Büntemeyer helped us with our substrate analysis via HPLC
Brigitte Dreiseickelmann and Ulrike Haake enabled us to perform ultracentrifugation

Modeling support

Dr. Petra Lutter helped us with the modeling of our project

Material support

Faculty of physics
Wendisch lab gave us the purification plasmids for the sedoheptulose 1,7-bisphosphate assay as well as some substances we lack of
Kruse lab gave us material for the thin layer chromatography to identify the functionality of the RuBisCO
Fermentation technology allowed us to use their laboratory facilities and provided us with material for HPLC analysis
Kalinowski lab provided us material for everything!

Mediating Substances advices

Falk Harnisch: Was one of our experts. We had a telephone chat with him concerning the set up and performance of our electrochemical eperiments with the potentiostat. He gave us some advice for the set up and provided us his publications concerning this topic.
Thomas Krieg: Member of the workgroup of Dirk Holtmann. He was always available for further inquiries and helped us with the interpretation of our results.
Dirk Holtmann: We visited him and his workgroup at the Dechema research institute in Frankfurt and we presented our project to him. He gave us plenty of advice for the realization and provided us platinum electrodes and alternative carbon electrode material. Furthermore we got insight into his laboratories which helped us with our own experiments.

Construction & Technical support

Dirk Bublitz: Employee of the firm “C3- Analysetechnik” supported us by providing a potentiostat for the duration of the competition. Furthermore he set the device up and introduced us to the different modes of operation.
Thomas Schäfer gave us advice concerning reactor cultivations and supplied us with material for our reactor set up. Furthermore he helped us to develop the H-cell reactor and introduced us to the workshop managers of the university that build the different parts for us.
Philip Grimm, a member of the group fermentation technology, gave us an introduction to the laboratory facilities and to the HPLC.

Advices

Prof. Dr. Katharina Kohse-Höinghaus and the group physical chemistry provided us information about combustion properties of isobutanol

Policy & Practices support

Dr. Arnold Sauter discussed several biosafety aspects with us and talked about acceptance of synthetic biology in general.
Matthias Braun provided us information about theological aspects of synthetic biology.
Big automotive firm of southern Germany gave us first information about general properties of fuels.
Another big automotive firm from Germany provided us information about the comparison of ethanol and butanol
A local energy supply company of Bielefeld (Stadtwerke Bielelfeld) did a meeting with our team to talk about our application ideas.
A major off shore wind parc constructeur, BARD engineering GmbH, did a telephone meeting with us to talk about wind power engines and their properties.
A member of the German Bundestag, Gero Storjohann, gave us some information which have were taken into account by doing research on applications
Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, provided us several information on future aspects of regenerative energy and their usage in the automotive industry
Eckart GmbH – a member of Altana told us that isobutanol itself is not used for pigments but butanols are interesting for production.
The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWI Bund) provided us information about feed-in management

Team:Bielefeld-CeBiTec/Acknowledgements

From 2014.igem.org

Attributions

Acknowledgements