We thank the CIPSM iGEM team members and Kirsten Jung and wish them good luck at this years competition! The International Genetically Engineered Machine competition (iGEM) is the premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition. The iGEM team LMU-Munich works on the project: "Production of azobenzene derivates in Escherichia coli and selection of successful transformants by apoptosis. The topic “Pathway” involves the creation of an artificial metabolic pathway for the synthesis of azobenzene derivates in E. coli. This will be accomplished by expressing the required enzymes enclosed in a proteinaceous bacterial microcompartment. This microcompartment is necessary to shield the cytoplasm from toxic intermediates which would otherwise make this biosynthesis impossible. Azobenzene derivates are interesting in the field of biochemistry because of their properties as synthetic molecular switches. The topic “ApoControl” is divided into three subprojects on controllable cell-death. The goal is to develop a system to improve the efficiency and specificity of gene expression in eukaryotic cell-lines and more specifically, to select cells expressing the target gene against cells that do not. Here, proapoptotic genes instead of antibiotic resistance are used as selection marker to induce clean cell-death at different stimuli. iGEM 2010 iGEM 2010 CIPSM team page