Team:Waterloo/Attributions
Attributions
Our project had many moving pieces, so there are many acknowledgments to give. From our large team, to our advisors, to graduate students in nearby labs, to some previous members on our team, a number of people contributed to this project and deserve recognition. All of the work except that listed below was performed by the team members. Details of member-specific work can be found on the Team page.
Project brainstorming
A teamwide effort, with help from 2014 team members Radmila Kovac and Julia Manalil. The plant viral defense aspect of the project was developed from an idea proposed by Steven ten Holder in the Winter 2015 offering of the course BIOL 349 (Synthetic Biology Project Design), co-taught by Marc Aucoin, Trevor Charles and Brian Ingalls.
General wet lab support
Dr. Jiujun Cheng and graduate students Maya D'Alessio, John Heil, and Kathy Lam have given us very helpful advice, protocols, and access to pieces of equipment not available in our lab.
Plant maintenance and tips
Dr. Trevor Charles, Dr. Barbara Moffatt, and graduate students Cherry Chen, and Maye Saechao donated Arabidopsis seeds, helped with planting and maintenance, and gave us protocols for performing floral dips, agroinfiltration, and creating protoplasts. Dr. Simon Chuong, Dr. Susan Lolle, Dr. Pearl Chang, and Destin Sigurdson also offered advice for floral dips and provided equipment and chemicals for Western blots.
Viral infection advice
Jamie McNeil, Dr. Aiming Wang, and a few other individuals at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada provided advice for infecting Arabidopsis with CaMV, and provided the resources and space to do so.
Protein dynamics advice
Dr. Andrew Doxey and Dr. Marc Aucoin were helpful resources for our sgRNA and Cas9 modifications, and offered advice on software to use and routes to pursue.
Modeling support
Dr. Brian Ingalls gave advice on all of our models and has been a very helpful resource, and gave some direction for the differential equation and agent-based models. Dr. Andrew Doxey gave advice on using (Py)Rosetta for protein modelling, and we had a couple helpful conversations with Dragos Chiriac from Queen's about PyRosetta and fold trees.
Business support
Lauren Kennedy, a friend of the team, and Pavel Shmatnik from the Toronto team have offered advice with our scale-up business model, and individuals from Canada Banana Farms and Agriculture Food Canada provided feedback on the plant application and direction.
Finance support
Suzie Alexander, the director of the 2014 Waterloo team, has given helpful financial and other administrative task advice.
Presentation advice
As part of the Ontario iGEM effort, all five Ontario, Canada iGEM teams (McMaster, Toronto, Queen's, Ottawa, and Waterloo) gave presentations and provided feedback for each team, as well as general project and collaboration support. We also received presentation advice from all five of our advisors, Dr. Andrew Doxey, Dr. Barbara Moffatt, Dr. Brian Ingalls, Dr. Marc Aucoin, and Dr. Trevor Charles.