Team:Hamburg/Attributions

Attributions

We got a lot of help in the pursuit of our project, namely in the following working areas by the listed people:

  • Acquisition of sponsors
    • Prof. Dr. Ulrich Hahn (University of Hamburg)
    • Prof. Dr. Zoya Ignatova (University of Hamburg)
  • RNA modeling
    • Prof. Andrew Torda (Center for Bioinformatics Hamburg)
    • Prof. Dr. Janusz Bujnicki (International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Warsaw)
  • Proof-reading of the presentation
    • Lisa Roth
  • iGEM-Registration, primer design, ordering of reagents
    • Prof. Dr. Zoya Ignatova (University of Hamburg)
    • Dr. Andreas Czech (University of Hamburg)
  • Operation of the devices in the lab, finding reagents
    • Prof. Dr. Arp Schnittger & AG (Biocenter Klein Flottbek, Hamburg)
  • Choice of a strain of bacteria
    • Prof. Dr. Jeff Tabor (Rice University, Houston)
  • Providing us with the pezT plasmid
    • Prof. Dr. Anton Meinhart (Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg)
  • Providing us with software and support for the risk assessment
    • Wüpper Management Consulting GmbH
  • Design of the sequencing primers
    • Leon Felipe Schmidt-Jimenez
  • Intensive support during the final days
    • Maximilian Anders
    • Cristian del Campo

However, most of the work was obviously done by us and even if everyone was somehow working on everything, we want to try to give a little credit to particular persons, where it is due.

Team Leadership (Henning)

He was the one that had the initial idea to even launch an iGEM Team in Hamburg. From then on he has been the indispensable member of the team that always pushed us forward, had the best ideas and is truly inspiring. Henning is the engine of our team and besides his brainwork, he managed to guide us through difficulties and through experimental dead-ends. We want to thank Henning for his spirit and leadership.

Web Engineering (Vincent and Maurice)

Vincent and Maurice spent an incredible amount of time trying to learn HTML and CSS, which they had never used before, to code up an appropriate website for our team’s online representation. Together they wrote several hundred lines of code and struggled through many long debugging sessions. We are really thankful for their endurance and studiousness.

Wiki Editing (Dana)

Dana was the editor-in-chief of our wiki as well as the main contributor of texts to the wiki. Her articulate and nonchalant style of writing makes reading our wiki pages a real joy. She always managed to be politely insistent, when people forgot to document their projects on the wiki in time and is mainly responsible for the completeness and elaborateness of our wiki.

Art Design (Sonja)

Our favorite biology student and art design hobbyist Sonja created our beautiful logo and put a lot of effort into the appearence of our poster and presentation. She has drawn a whole bunch of different logo versions, almost until getting carpal tunnel syndrome, before we had finally chosen one. By always stoically enduring our - partially even contradictory - change requests, she has definitely earned our deep respect.

Modeling (Maurice and Vincent)

Maurice did the network modeling, while Vincent was responsible for the RNA structure. They were both utilizing many skills and a lot of knowledge, that they acquired at their respective bachelor theses at the Center for Bioinformatics Hamburg. Without their broad understanding of the mathematical and physical foundations, we could not have worked out the theoretical background of our project so well, which is why they contributed to our work in an extremely significant way.

Risk Assessment (Kira)

Kira has worked very closely with WMC to tailor their software suite QSEC specifically to our needs. She has spent countless hours with exhaustively assessing and compiling assets, processes, threats and vulnerabilities, while at the same time reading lots of German and European standards and guidelines for risk management in laboratories. Her job has surely been the most bureaucratic one and she has proven really strong nerves carrying it through.

Safety (Nikolas)

Niko was responsible for the safety of our project and was reliably checking all used organisms and chemicals. Moreover, he was constantly reminding us of every important deadline and filled out all the respective forms.

Workplace (Artur)

Artur was the main person in charge for the autolysis part of our project and arranged our workplace. Due to his pessimistic nature he called in many cases in a necessary way diverse ideas into questions. Because of him some rational decisions were made and some less were not. He kept our workbench always clean and tidy and every reagent and culture in place. Thanks to him, we never had trouble finding the correct buffers and our cells were always incubated at the correct temperatures.

Ethics (Julian)

Julian organised the symposium and held the talk on the Ethics of Emerging Technologies. He was always calm and attentive, when everyone else was freaking out because of approaching deadlines or failed experiments and has been our last resort, when it came to time-critical jobs, which had to be done late in the evening or on weekends. He could more than compensate his slightly less comprehensive lab experience with his commitment and working morale.

Notebook (Heiko)

Heiko was a very strict and rigorous guardian over our notebook and was admittedly sometimes a real pain in the ass, when we were too slow in maintaining our online labbook or not abiding his sophisticated formatting rules for the physical one. It is solely his merit, that we probably have the most consistently formatted labbook of all iGEM teams. Hence, it is a real pity, that there is no special award for that.

We thank our sponsors: