The iGEM Project Aachen aims to give students the opportunity to work independently on a project relatively early in their studies. However, the students do not only work in the laboratory but also organize themselves, step into conversations with society and carry out fundraising to finance the project and the trip to Boston. Our team consists almost only of bachelor students from different courses as well as with different backgrounds, who joined together to take part in iGEM. However, our working group lacked two things: experience and expertise.

This is the reason why we want to use this website to thank all the people and institutes of our university who helped us achieve our goals of water desalination. Actually, without the support of these it would not have been possible to realize our project.

Stefanie Brands

She works in the Schwaneberg Laboratory at RWTH Aachen University and helped us use microtiterplate readers. Because of the InterLab Study, we needed to learn how to handle such machines. Thanks to her we were able to succesfully complete the InterLab Study in time.

Dr. Johannes Schiffels

He is one of the superintendents at the Schwaneberg Laboratory. When our project was stuck and we struggled with our experiments having a low success rate, he gave use some useful advice to speed up our workflow and increase the effectiveness of our transformations. In addition, thanks to his expertise and tips, we had been able to start a collaboration with Team Duesseldorf-Cologne.

Isabel Hofmann and Soumiya Ezzahoini

Both are part of the Schwaneberg team. They took time to help with the conduction of our experiments and the evaluation of our results. As well, they helped us to improve our experiment execution velocity and efficiency.

Volkan Besirlioglu

He is taking his doctorate at Schwaneberg laboratory and he had already carried out the measurements for the InterLab Study for the last iGEM team. Because of this, we asked him to explain us some parts of the protocol for the InterLab Study we did not understand. He not only clarified it, but also told us about some useful websites which we could use for the design of our presentation for the Giant Jamboree.

Khalil Essani

He is taking his doctorate at Schwaneberg laboratory as well and because of his work with the fluorescence microscopy, he is our most proficient advisor for the corresponding machine. Our goal was to show that our channels had been integrated in the Yeast vacuolar membrane by creating fluorescent fusionproteins, so we needed the fluorescence microscope to confirm it. Khalil Essani introduced us to the machine and gave us many useful tips to improve the resolution of our samples.

Juliane Röder

She is part of the Bio7 working team and helped us in the beginning of our project.

Dr. rer. nat. Christina Dickmeis

She is working at the Bio7 facility as well and her work consists of Plant Virus Functionalization for biomaterials. She is the person, who gave us the first instructions in the laboratory. Because of her experience she took a lot of time to help us with a big amount of our experiments. We want to expecially thank her for the time she spend to help us with the conduction of a quantitative PCR. In addition, she gave us useful advice to speed up our work flow and improve our dexterity.

Dr. Ulrich Commandeur

He works at the Bio7 researching Molecular Plant Virology and at the time he is the director of the Bio7 institute. He allowed us to use his facility and also gave us permission to use the Bio7 laboratory to produce a film about iGEM and our project. Furthermore, he occasionally sacrified some of his time to help us with the discussion of our results.

Karolin

She is part of the Bio7 team. She also took time with Dr. rer. nat. Christine Dickmeis to give us our fist instruction in the omonimous laboratory and advised us in several lab problems we faced.

Helen Rosenkranz and Manja Kropp

They are the responsible and competent contacts for accounting and finance at the IAMB institute of RWTH Aachen University. They kept an eye on our economic situation and together with our fundraising team managed the booking of our flights and the accommodation in Boston for the Giant Jamboree.

Karl-Willi Hüser

He is part of the IAMB team and he works as a non-scientific assistent in professor Schirawski´s Team. He was the one who first introduced us to the "Praktikumslabor" and taught us the basics of laboratory work. For instance, he was the one who explained us how to use an autoclave. Additionaly, he told us about the possibility of opening up cells by using beads.

Dario Neves

He is part of the IAMB team as well. He took the time to help us with measuring growth curves with the GrowthProfiler 960.

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Stefan Gründer

He is the director of the institute for physiology at the "Uniklinik" and he also has his own research group. He and his group provided us with protocols and contacts when we struggled finding a method to measure the quantity of sodium and chloride we were able to accumulate in our cells in an accurate manner. For example, they gave us the protocol we used to isolate vacuoles from Yeast cells. Not only did they supply us with their expertise, but they also told us where to find the machines we needed for the tests we wanted to conduct.

Dr. rer. nat. Martin Gruhlke

He works at the Bio3 institute and he has worked with Yeast before. He taught us the basics of working with Yeast cells and, in addition, provided us with a plasmid which contained a Gal1-cassette we used, in order to activate the expression of our GOI.

Catalina Novoa-Henríquez

She is a PhD fellow at the DWI - Leibniz-Institute for Interactive Materials. She kindly provided us with a conductometer as well as her advice.

Julia Nießen & Heike Bergstein

Mrs Nießen and Mrs Bergstein helped us to develop measurement procedures for sodium. They also measured our samples with their ICP-OES, which we are very thankful for.