From 2007.igem.org

• Our team was set in February and we have been working since then. This is our first year in iGEM, and we are very happy to be involved in this organization. The first idea of iGEM team was suggested by undergraduate students, and then supported by our professors and graduate students in [http://www.metu.edu.tr METU]. There is no ongoing projects in the area of Synthetic Biology in Turkey, and our first aim was to raise the awareness on this area and pioneer the first undergraduate project in our departmnet.

• We are a team founded and motivated by undergraduates and we do not have any instructor working in the area of sythetic biology nearby or a mentor that could lead us, so we are trying to educate ourselves.

• As this will be our first experience to develop a project on our own with all its finacial and organizational aspects and as we are training ourselves in this new area that we haven't been taught before, we decided to take this first year to learn how things are done and to gain experience. All the team members were to be involved in other projects in different institutions for summer practice as required by our undergraduate curriculum, so we tried to work for our iGEM project before July and after September. Because our timeline is not aligning with that of the competition, there remains a very limited time for the wetlab experiments. Therefore, for this first year we decided to concentrate on the theoretical work for the possible projects and also on learning the organizational manners like starting a team, funding, prepare a whoe money and time planning, ordering lab equipments and materials, using wiki, learning about desingning parts and the Registry.

• Althought we did not perform the experiments, we learnt and practiced the lab procedures used in sythetic biology and bought the necessary lab materials. So we are ready to prepare a whole project for the coming year.