Team:Kent/Attributions
Attributions
Project design
Our entire team together with the instructors and advisors together decided on the project that we are carrying out in the beginning of the summer. The team met up once every week to share project ideas and discuss the direction of the project during the summer. The project that we have designed is to create nanowire amyloid produced be E.coli creating a more biocompatible and cheaper alternative to current materials. We were inspired by the pioneering work carried out by Ann Hochschild and Viknesh Sivanathan which provided us with information on how to utilise the curli export system of E.coli. The amyloid fusion protein that we have produced has been made using Sup35NM fused to a cytochrome. More on the description of our project can be found here.
Modelling
We wanted to develop tools to predict the growth and production of amyloid nano-wires, and to find a way to visually represent the amyloid production of the E.coli bacteria in 3D. This was accomplished by the modeling team consisting of James, Moyra and Raneem. The team developed a new software implementing Brownian dynamics Monte Carlo method (add references) written.... More can be found about our modeling here.
Policy and Practise
The main Policy and Practice issues identified by the team is centered on policy and public opinion on the use of bio-nano material. Finding out what the general public and members of parliament thought of our idea was, therefore, carried out in order to develop a wider understanding of how our product would be received in the real world. A Policy and Practice team consisting of Moyra, Raneem, Alice and Anna was formed to allow us to communicate with other iGEM teams as well as the general public and political figures to gather their opinions and tell them more about our project. More information on our Policy and Practice can be found here.
Wet lab
The wet lab work was naturally given to the bioscientists within the team, including Katarina, Richard, Alice, Natalie, Suparna, Jonathan, Anna and Rob, who have carried out a vast range of experiments including but not exclusively AFM (Atomic Force Microscopy) imaging, Gibson Assembly, Ligation and PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction). This was vital to the success of our project and was our main focus throughout the competition. More of our protocols, experiments and results can be found here.
Writing
Throughout the course of iGEM the whole team have been carrying out research and reading papers related to our project to allow us all to contribute to writing up our final project. We have weekly meetings where we talk to one another about what has been done during the week which we record in our notebook which you can find here . We have designed and written posters, presentations and in depth explanations into our project that the whole team have helped produce.
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, Gibson assembly, 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.