Team:TU Darmstadt/human practices/integrated

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Integrated Human Practices

Our goal in this year’s iGEM Competition was to produce designer chitosan. Chitosan is a deacetylated biopolymer of chitin. To learn more in detail about chitosan, we decided to talk to experts to improve our project. In this context, we invited the president of the European Chitin Society, Prof. Dr. Bruno Moerschbacher from the Westfalian Wilhelm’s University Münster to visit us which he then did on the 25th of July. It was a full day of interesting conversations and helpful information. After we presented our project, he told us about his broad experiences with chitosan and different chitin deacetylases he had already worked with. In the end, his visit resulted in some crucial changes of direction in our project.
Because of tips and information he provided us with, we dropped the quite difficult work concerning one of our chitin deacetylases from the fungus Puccinia graminis f. sp. Tritici (PUC). Instead, we started working on a new chitin deacetylase from the organism Vibrio cholerae (COD), as he advised us to. So his input shaped our project considerably and enabled us to get on the right track.
But this was not the only point in which he assisted us. Prof. Dr. Bruno Moerschbacher decided to offer us his help for the duration of the project, after he experienced the passion that we showed.
From this day on he was a huge supporter and helped us in many different aspects of our project. For the Chitin Synthase group, he suggested a thin-layer chromatography (TLC) assay. For the Chitin Deacetylases group he helped even more. Beside the replacement of one of our chitin deacetylases, he suggested the TLC assay as well as the acetic acid kit. He and his AG were very kind and helped us with all our questions that arose during the project and provided possible approaches for our problems.
His input had great impact on our project and the way we moved forward with our work. In return, we hope that we managed to leave a good lasting impression. Also, we like to think, we did a good job of introducing him to the concept of iGEM.