Team:Dundee/Attributions

Attributions

Attributions

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Acknowledgements

We would firstly like to thank Tracy Palmer, Frank Sargent and Fordyce Davidson for giving us this amazing opportunity to participate in the iGEM competition. Thank you for all the feedback and support provided during the Monday and Friday meetings, and for keeping us on track throughout the entire process.

We would like to thank all of our advisors Fatima, Alex, John and Lucas for helping us through the summer by giving us important feedback on how our project was developing and giving us the push and motivation that we sometimes needed. A special thanks for all your help when writing the content for the wiki.

Our wet lab advisors Fatima, Alex and John trained us in the lab giving us the vital skills we needed in order to complete our iGEM project. They advised us from the very beginning, on how to design primers, clone our device, run DNA gels, carry out bacterial transformations, analyse our DNA sequencing data all the way to characterising our biobrick devices by western blotting. Lucas was responsible for helping us to produce detailed mathematical models as well as providing much guidance throughout the whole project.

We would like to thank the Molecular Microbiology department, in particular, Michele Liney and Jackie Heilbronn, for making us feel so welcome over the summer and providing us with the lab, office and computer space.

Thank you to Dr Grant Buchanan and Alex Finney for providing us with Serratia marcescens Db11 gDNA.

Thank you to Dr Grant Buchanan for advice and tips when cloning wasn’t working.

Thank you to the IT department for getting our accounts up and running.

Thank you to the Central Technical services for giving media. They provided a fast and reliable service throughout the entire project and were always friendly and helpful whenever we needed help filling out the order forms.

Thank you to the MRC PPU DNA sequencing and services for giving us some free sequencing runs.

Thank you to Zach Holmes for freelance engineering the ACME Stomach Masher.

Thank you to Kate Harper, Jackie Heilbronn and Jackie Glenn for assisting in the printing for the various merchandise required for the Dundee iGEM team.

A special thank you to Erin Stanbridge for being highly organised and arranging all our travel and visa paperwork for the events that we’ve attended throughout the course of iGEM. We don’t think we’d make it to Boston without you.

Thank you to Dr Jacqui McElhiney and her team at Food Standard Scotland for guiding our project into what it has become today. We'd also like to thank Katherine Allan at the Veterinary Medicines Directorate in the Department for Food, the Environment and Rural Affairs for guiding our project into a real-world application.

PiCLS Symposium for giving us the platform to practice our iGEM presentation. We really appreciate the opportunity to do so and received valuable feedback with regards to the presentation, allowing us to improve upon it for the Boston jamboree.

We would like to thank IDT for giving us 10,000 free bases for synthesising gBlock Gene fragments. This made our summer so much easier, one less PCR makes all the difference.

Team Attributions

Kieron Lucas

I spent this summer working in the wet lab and I received help from all other wet lab members in order to finish experiments and to plan our constructs. When I was attempting to produce the full length colicin control constructs, Rachel and Chris helped me with cloning and to verify the constructs through gel analysis. I received a lot of help from the advisors Fatima, Alex and John when completing a new procedure or when I had any questions. I was involved in creating the Bactifeed and received a lot of help from John as he had experience in this area allowing me to carry out these experiments well and receive good data.

Fatima Rehman

Whilst working in the dry lab, I got a lot of help from Lucas for the mathematical modelling. He would give me different tasks to focus on, to help me build my knowledge within MATLAB – we then went on to carry out mathematical modelling. Professor Davidson also assisted and guided me throughout the modelling stages. He pushed us to improve ourselves with our presentation, with his vast knowledge and experience of iGEM. Fatima helped me in the lab when I was carrying out my plate reader experiments, helped edit the presentation and also helped me improve my presenting skills.

Holly Parker

During the summer I was working on the characterisation of the promoter parts which we were using, I received help from Fatima Ulhuq, Alex Finney and John Allan. These people helped me familiarise myself with the protocols and towards the end of the project they all helped with last minute Western blotting. I also worked on designing the Hardware, for which I received a helping hand from a volunteering freelance engineer (Zachary Holmes) who was not part of our team. He used the Dundee's Makers Space to put the hardware together. The hardware was then used for our proof of concept experiments which were carried out by Kieron, Darren and John. Outside of the wet lab I was part of the presentation team and together with Rachel and Fatima Rehman we received a lot of helpful feedback from John, Alex and Fatima Ulhuq as well as our Supervisors, Frank Sargent, Fordyce Davidson and Tracy Palmer. Many thanks to everyone who helped.

Darren Scrimgeour

I worked in the Dry Lab, focusing on Human Practices and how it affects our project. Throughout the summer, we spoke to several government bodies including Food Standards Scotland and the Department for the Environment for Food and Rural Affairs regarding our project and how we could improve. I also organised a day at the Glasgow Science Centre displaying interactive experiments, with help from Professor Nicola Stanley-Wall and Erin Hardee, and co-organised a debate with the University of Edinburgh Undergraduate iGEM team, and the debating unions of the Universities of Dundee and Edinburgh.

Rachel Elliott

In the wet lab, I had a lot of help from our advisors Fatima Ulhuq, Alex Finney, John Allan. They taught me the basic skills needed to begin the project and helped me to work through lab problems as they arose throughout the summer. Fatima and Alex helped to design the lysis experiment we used to test our modified toxins. The other members of the Wet Lab, Holly, Chris and Kieron were also always there to lend a hand when needed. I was also part of the presentation team with Holly Parker and Fatima Rehman, we received extensive advice from the three aforementioned advisors as well as Lucas Morales and Professors Frank Sargent, Tracy Palmer and Fordyce Davidson, and the rest of team.

Chris Nelis

For the first half of the project I was involved in the web labs work helping to produce the first constructs that were produced. I received help from Kieron in the lab when carrying out the early stages of the cloning. A lot of my time has been spent working on the wiki and I would like to say thanks to everyone for working on the content for the site and thanks to our advisor Fatima for helping with the content and uploads for the wiki. I got help from all of the advisors when starting the lab work to make sure I knew how to properly carry out all lab work to a high standard.

Ummi Jameel

I spent my summer doing the graphic design for the team as well as the merchandise for Boston. I received help from the team in many ways in helping to understand the science behind the project.