Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to thank Professor Eils for bringing together such a divers team of students and share not only his vision, but also his resources with us. It is far from usual to put this much trust (and money) into a student research group, and it cannot be overstated how much we appreciate it.

Our greatest thanks go, without any doubt, to Dr. Grimm. His total devotion and dedication to iGEM, his patience and his ability to take our project to levels that we couldn't even have dreamt of by ourselves have helped to bring out the best in each of our experiments.

Now let’s talk about Jens. Without him, none of us would have been part of iGEM, and if it wasn’t for him, none of us would have found our inner dancing abilities (because for some of us, they were hidden quite deeply). But he believed in us, even after the first disastrous dancing lessons, and made us into the first iGEM team that would also be able to win any cheerleading competition. Of course we are also thankful for all the support and the management of the lab.

We would like thank all of our advisors, who have been a pleasure to work with (although we are not sure they can say the same thing about us), and have been extremely patient with our questions and problems. They were always there for us and even in desperate and laborious times, they stayed with us even if that meant seeing the sunrise from the BioQuant balcony. Our thanks go to (in strict alphabetical order): Charley, Christina, Clarissa, Joel, Kathleen, Marina and Paula. Without your help, sacrifice and dedication, we wouldn't be anywhere close to here.

Thanks to the members of the iGEM 2009 team, whose efforts pointed us in the right direction and give us a nice ground to built on.

Very much appreciated are also the companies, foundations and the academic sponsors, who believed in our project and sponsored our work.

We have to be thankful to our families, our partners and our friends, who had to put up with our strange work timetables and our non availability during the last four months. Thank you all for understanding what science and iGEM meant to us during all this time and helping us to push through the harder times on our way.

On a strict personal level, and without ever revealing why, we also have to thank: Nespresso, Ritter Sport (and chocolate in general), a green balloon, big waterfalls, self-controlled trains, random bacteria who decide to grow up where they shouldn't and contaminate our cell culture, Polish mint-flavoured Vodka, green comfy chairs, table football, explicit hip-hop songs, mojitos, tigers, easy-to-strip lab coats, emotional breakdowns in the lab, all of the Harry Potter characters, disgusting Mensa food, the people who once forgot to lock the door to the great 7th floor balcony, Bellini...

all of these made iGEM experience... unique and unforgettable.