Team:UCL/Attributions

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Attributions

Thank you for all the support we received throughout the summer! Scroll down to see who contributed to our project
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General support

  • Anna Dumitriu: We are very grateful to Anna for making a bio-art of our first ever probiotic in Nissle strain.
  • Graham Miller: thanks for shipping your inspiring ‘Photohonesty’ artwork all the way down form Scotland and joining us in a very special afternoon at the Dragon Café.
  • Prof. Glyn Lewis: for providing us with a very insightful advice about the science of our project from a psychiatric perspective.
  • Prof. Dame Sue Bailey: for providing us with some great advice regarding mental health and participating in our video assays.
  • Prof John Cryan: we are specially grateful to our main inspiration and benchmark in our this whole ‘Mind the gut’ adventure. It was a wonderful experience meeting you at Cork as well as very helpful for the further development of our project.
  • The Germ Guy: for sending us some fantastic papers that really helped to shape our project and develop our sensors.
  • Eben Kirksey: from Princeton University, who will feature us in his new book for Duke University Press after falling in love with our hypersymbionts.
  • Dr. Jack Stilgoe: who kindly answers all our questions about bioethics and public engagement.
  • Liz and Weston from Sonnenburg Lab, Stanford: thanks for Skyping with us and give us some advice on synthetic biology and the gut microbiota.
  • Joe and Celie Owl n’ wolf: who were on holidays and still managed to develop a beautiful short animation to explain our ’Mind the gut’ project to the general public.
  • Grace Geremy and: we really appreciate that you agreed taking part in our video assays and answering tonnes of questions about mental health, sharing with us some of your personal experiences and helping us to fight stigma around mental disorders.
  • David Turner from ‘Silence found a tongue’: thank you for your inspiring performance in the Open Mind Night and for taking part in our video assays.
  • Danielle Leaga: our comic designer, for making Bactoman come true.

Advisors

  • Dr. Darren Nesbeth : We are very thankful to Darren, our project supervisor for all the meetings from discussing the project plan to biobricks. His advice and guidance has helped us scrutinize and improve every aspect of the project.
  • Edoardo Gianni: We are most grateful to Edo for organizing the meetings to discuss our project ideas, bootcamp, meetups, collaborations and so much more.
  • Georgia Bondy: We are very thankful to Georgia, (ex UCL iGEM member) for her support and guidance on policies and practices. Our human practice and public engagement sector would have never been the same without her help.
  • Lewis Iain: We are thankful to Lewis for his advice on modelling and software. We are also grateful for the jokes and jelly-shots you made so lovingly for our team.
  • Maria Jose Henrique: We would like to thank Jose for helping us with logistics and lab.
  • Dr. Stephanie Braun: For every new protocol, lab experiment, logistics and every small query, we would like to express our humble gratitude to Steffi for being there at every step of our project.
  • Dr. Vitor Pinheiro : We want to extend our kind gratitude to Dr. Pinheiro for his continuous advice, support and guidance on or project. We are most grateful for his suggestions on biosafety as well as his conference on different gene assembly methods.
  • Yan-Kay Ho: We are eternally grateful for Yan Kay’s tireless efforts to remind us of the iGEM and internal deadlines, for arranging our dates for flying to Boston and more.
  • Dr. Ya-Yu Chiang: for helping us make the awesome microfluidics chip.
  • Prof. John Ward: for all his help and advice concerning our pregnenolone BioBrick.
  • Fiona Truscott: for advising us on constructing and characterising the pregnenolone BioBrick.
  • Ludmila Ruban: for giving us advice on mammalian cell culture and for helping us obtain the resources and space needed for mammalian cell work.
  • Gerardo Santiago: for supervising all our mammalian cell work and taking care we didn’t contaminate everything!
  • Dr. Marco Marquez: for his bulging bioreactor design which inspired us.
  • Dr Paul Sharp: for lending us his expertise in intestinal cells and giving us the Caco-2 cells we desperately needed
  • Dr. Chris Barnes: for helping us with the tricky modelling

The dragon Cafe

Special thanks to all the people that come daily to this inspiring space that warmly welcomed us, listened to our crazy project ideas and provided us with great feedback and plenty of questions about our probiotics. We would also like to that the organizers Declan, Seth and Li that helped us organize and coordinate our presentations and art exhibition with Graham Miller.

UCL Academy students

Thanks to all the UCL Academy students that have been working with us throughout the summer, helping us with the hard work and contributing to our project with exciting new ideas.

  • Laura Price
  • Pedrena Roofe
  • Ehssan Baghban
  • Mohammed Dardouk
  • Richmond Tabajonda
  • Fardowsa Alice
  • Chinwe Alino
  • Adama Saccoh
  • Justas Stanislovas
  • Raknee Baharj
  • Amina Mohamed

Biochemical Engineering lab- UCL

We were hosted and carried out all our work in the lab facilities of the Biochemical Engineering department of UCL. There, we were kindly provided with all the materials and machinery needed to carry out all our molecular biology, microfluidics, fermentations and mammalian cell culture experiments.

We would like to thanks the Microfluidics department for letting as use their space to build our gut-on-a-chip device and providing us with really helpful advice.

Entrepreneurship

  • Albert Flynn, a professor in UCC who is an expert in food regulations; and helped us adapt our product to the european legislation.
  • Christof Koelsch, Managing director of diaceutics, and expert in personalized medicine, who helped us give shape to the personalization algorithm.
  • Christian Rayner, Business advisor in UCL advances, who assisted us with the marketing strategy.
  • Professor Nigel Tichener-Hooker, who advised us on the manufacturing optimization.
  • And Rhiannon Turner, expert in European and UK biotechnology patents, who is currently helping us draft our provisional patent application.
  • In addition to this, we attended the Indiebio Cork Demo day, and talked with the entrepreneurs from the accelerator, especially with Ageria, who are developing a novel probiotic yogurt, and are assisting us with product development and funding applications.
  • Anthony Finklestein - Dean of the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences, funded our trip to Cork
  • Laura Capponi, who helped us with financial projections and production process design.

Universities

We would like to thank the iGEM teams of University of Michigan, University of Manchester-Graz and Birbeck for synthesising the parts we desperately needed to assemble our pregnenolone Biobrick.