All the work not mentioned here was done by the students in the team. Most of the modeling and wet lab work was completed by the students, with help and guidance from people mentioned below. Wiki and website were created by the students with their previous knowledge. Aalto-Helsinki logo base was created by the previous years team.
Our Supporters
Project support and advice
Our project is based on two publications about propane production in E. coli.
Kallio P, Pasztor A, Thiel K, Akhtar MK, Jones PR. An engineered pathway for the biosynthesis of renewable propane. Nat Commun. 2014;5:4731. doi: 10.1038/ncomms5731.
Menon N, Pásztor A, Menon BR, et al. A microbial platform for renewable propane synthesis based on a fermentative butanol pathway. Biotechnology for Biofuels. 2015;8:61. doi:10.1186/s13068-015-0231-1.
Professor Pauli Kallio and Dr. András Pásztor have provided us with valuable advice about the propane pathway and its construction.
Our micelle-enzymes are derived from the study by Huber et al.
Huber, Matthias C., et al. "Designer amphiphilic proteins as building blocks for the intracellular formation of organelle-like compartments." Nature materials 2014; 15. doi: 10.1038/NMAT4118.
Our advisor professor Markus Linder has given us valuable feedback on our ideas and general input on our development. Doctor Jussi Jäntti and other researchers from VTT gave help with expanding our idea and building our story.
Fundraising help and advice
Aalto-Helsinki 2014 helped us on how to approach possible sponsors and also provided us with a list of companies that they had contacted and where they had found funding.
Merja Penttilä from VTT and Markus Linder helped us with finding contacts in companies and gave suggestions on how to approach sponsors.
Lab support
Aalto University and our advisor Markus Linder provided us with lab spaces, equipment and resources for gene synthesis. Also the rest of his group has given us good advice while working in the lab this summer. Martina Ikonen and Minttu Salmela from last year’s team gave us good tips on lab work and helped us design our primers.
Heli Viskari helped us with practicalities in the lab and took care of our orders. She also helped us with designing primers.
Pauli Kallio sent us plasmid maps, plasmids and strains from his research.
Anssi Rantasalo from VTT helped us designing our assembly constructs.
Jussi Jäntti from VTT helped us with choosing a linker sequence and told us about the amphiphilic proteins.
Dominik Mojzita from VTT introduced us to the Gibson Assembly method.
Anja Martinez from Thermo Fisher helped us to optimized our genes fit for synthesis.
Rest of Markus' lab group helped us with practicalities in the lab.
András Pásztor gave us many ideas and insights on producing propane. He also helped us with the methods to detect propane and designing the constructs.
Pekka Heino and Tapio Palva gave us some insights on cellulose degradation and pointed out some possible flaws in our system so we were able to do more research and fix them. Pekka Heino also gave some suggestions on the practicalities regarding wet lab work.
Janne Wallenius helped us set up our continuous production and gave advice and estimates on good parameters to use for it.
Difficult technique support
Merja Aho from VTT gave us some tips on places to get started and advice on the tools we could use for modeling.
Elena Czeizler from Aalto University gave us insights on what to use for modeling and how to proceed with it.
Anna-Liisa Ruskeepää from VTT who ran our GC-analysis for all the propane samples and created standards for them. Furthermore gave advices for analysis.
Antti Rantasalo from VTT and our avisor Heli Viskari helped us with our sequence design.
Project advisor support
Markus Linder advised us throughout the project starting from ideation to presenting at the jamboree. He helped us get in contact with researchers who helped us in defining our project idea and gave us tips on labwork, modeling and funding. He also gave us feedback on our project throughout the summer and helped us refine our presentation and poster.
Heli Viskari helped us with practicalities in the lab and with lab orders. She also followed our project closely throughout the summer and gave feedback on our approaches and our presentations.
Human practices support
Tarja Knuuttila and her research group helped us create our idea and gave feedback and suggestions on the questions we chose. They helped us analyze and gather our results and gave feedback on our report.