Attributions

Project design

We met up once every week to brainstorm ideas and come to a mutual agreement on what project that we were going to carry out during the summer. We have identified a very real problem that we have found a practical and beneficial answer to. The project that we have designed is to create nanowire amyloid formed from E.coli creating a more biocompatible and cheaper alternative to current materials. The amyloid that we will produce will have additional cytochrome and heam allowing it to conduct electricity.

Modelling

We wanted to find a way of visually representing the amyloid production of the E.coli bacteria that we have transformed. We chose to do this using Matlab to code this simulation. This model gives us a mathematical representation of the polymerisation and degradation of our protein monomers making up the conductive amyloid. Through research papers and Brownian dynamics we have achieved a model of our project that represents our conductive amyloid formation.

Outreach

Finding a way in which to gauge what the general public and members of parliament thought of our idea was carried out through questionnaires sent to members of parliament in the local area and Europe and posted on social networks. This was so that we knew what people thought of our project and give us a realistic idea of how feasible it was. A social networking team was created to allow us to communicate with other iGem teams as well as the general public on our progress and new ideas.

Wet lab

To carry out our project which was a very practical task we have had to spend numerous hours in labs at our university carry out various protocols to provide us with a functional end product. We worked in our labs every day from monday to friday from 9am-5pm (when the labs were open).

Writing

Throughout the project the whole team has been required to carry out research and read papers related to our project so that each member can participate in writing on their area of the project.

Team

• Raneem AlJaghoub

  Raneem was part of the outreach team, developing the Policies and Practices part of our project. She interviewed international politicians and developed a questionnaire on synthetic biology. Raneem also contributed in the improvement of the wiki as well as constructing the parameters list for the modelling and designing the project. Raneem was a presenter at the Boston Jamboree.



• James Aston

  James developed the model of our system; he went the extra mile and rendered the equations into a code and afterwards into a 3D animation of our system. James also created the wiki skeleton and improved it during the competition. He collaborated the UNITN iGEM team by helping to create a model for their system. He also designed the project. James was a presenter at the Boston Jamboree.



• Anna Beltrami

  Anna was part of the wet lab team. In particular, she performed transformations, produced competent cells and helped capture pictures of the control samples with the Atomic Force Microscope. Anna constructed the organisational infrastructure of the team. She managed the social network channels and the overall communications with other teams, liasing collaborations. She helped review the wiki and she designed the project. Anna was a presenter at the Boston Jamboree.



• Moyra Chikomo

  Moyra was part of the outreach team, developing the Policies and Practices part of our project. She wrote post notes and helped in the creation of a questionnaire on synthetic biology sent to politicians and the general public. She designed and created a GUI (graphic used interface) for our projects as well as designing our banner.



• Richard Crane

  Richard was part of the wet lab team. In particular, he took part in most of the Lab work. His main contribution lies specifically in the imaging of the congo red and heme plates for the validation part of our project. He has made most agarose gels within the team.



• Rob Middlewick

  Rob was involved in lab work where he did mostly transformations as well as helping other members of the team with various protocol. He has played a key part in the scientific writing of our project, this included the project description and the description of our BioBricks.



• Katarina Pisani

  Kat being part of the main lab team was involved in all the wet lab aspects of our project. She has carried out ligations, PCR reactions and run diagnostic gels as well as much more. She has also presented at our outreach events and contributed to our final project design.



• Jonathan Pope

  Jonathan was also responsible for creating our posters and Envirowire logo. He has presented at our outreach events and has also assisted the lab team. He has designed our presentations and helped with the scientific and wiki writing. He has also held the main wet lab team in some protocol including carrying out diagnostic Congo red plating and transformations. Jonathan is also presenting at the Boston Jamboree.



• Natalie Sloan

  Natalie took part in designing and writing the wiki and creating the Kent iGEM logo. She is also part of the main wet lab team where she has carried out mini-preps, ligations and transformations as well as producing competent cells. Natalie has also helped design the project and contributed to scientific writing.



• Suparna Thakali

  Suparna contributed mainly to the wet lab team where she took part in carrying out Gibson assembly and ligation reactions. She contributed to the wiki page as well as project design and writing.



• Alice Tomlinson

  Alice was involved in organising the outreach aspect of our project such as gathering MPs opinion on synthetic biology and its possible applications in our society. She also conducted interviews and presented our project to other teams at our meet-ups. The majority of her time has been spent in the lab carrying out Gibson assembly and diagnostics tests.

Supervisors

Advisors

We would like to thank the following for their support: