Attributions
We would like to thank our supervisor, advisors, and the many people who have generously shared their time and expertise with us, and without whom this project would not have been possible, let alone finished in time…
First and foremost, we are indebted to Dr Richard Bowman, who gave us the idea for our project and let us base our mechanical stage on that of his PiScope (a fantastic open-source inverse bright-field microscope). He also helped us figure out the light path for our fluorescence microscope and taught us how to invert the Raspberry Pi lens.
Check out Richard’s microscope here: [LINK TO REPOSITORY].
Next, we would like to thank our PI and team leader, Prof Jim Hasseloff from the Department of Plant Sciences, for his support and patience. Thanks for sorting out sponsorship, bringing us experts as we needed them and not murdering us when we were obtuse.
In terms of safety and wellbeing, infinite credit to Kate Armfield, our wonderful full-time advisor, who has helped us in all aspects of our project, including logistics, press releases and generally making sure we don’t set things on fire. Also thanks to Barbara Landamore, chief technician extraordinaire, who helped us with risk assessments and lab protocols and not chopping our hands off.
On the optical design front, we would like to thank Dr George Sirinakis and Dr Alex Sossick from the Gurdon institute, who gave us advice on how to improve the performance of our microscope. Credit is also due to Tobey Wenzel and Luka Mustafa for their help with electronics and other hardware aspects of our project.
During the very early brainstorming stage of our project, we had expert help from several people. In particular, thanks to Bernardo Pollak for his help with Marchantia, Dr Dennis Bray for his talk on bacterial chemotaxis and Dr James Locke for his contribution to the Evolvinator idea. And of course, Dr Bowman, who showed us his PiScope in action.
We are grateful to Dr Nicola Patron and others at the John Innes Centre, for supporting our project and giving us feedback on our preliminary presentation and on the microscope itself. Thanks also to Dr Jenny Molloy for organising a practice Jamboree presentation for us, and for giving us advice on a regular basis, and to Dr Alexandre Kabla from the Department of Engineering, for project advice and for convincing the Engineering Department to give us a lot of money (yay!).
In terms of collaboration, thanks to the Glasgow and William & Mary iGEM teams for sending us some samples to image (and to Dr Paul Grant for helping us with some bacteria transformations), and to the Westminster iGEM team for helping us organise a microscopy workshop at their UK iGEM meetup.
We are also indebted to Sarah Collins, Tom Almeroth-Williams, Sue Long, and Louise Walsh from Cambridge University Press for helping with our press releases and our outreach event.
Thanks to Amanda Whitehead and Dr Shaila Kotadia from Synthetic Dance-ology, for picking our microscope as the focus of their dance workshop; Prof Clemens Kaminski of the Laser Analytics Group for his stimulating talk on Optical Superresolution Imaging at Homerton College; and last by not least, Dr Fernán Federici, Dr James Brown and all the other people who have encouraged us and given us feedback.
